The Wishgiver
by Draenog Glas
Summary: A young, lonely girl living in a psychiatric ward named Annabelle Wayne, has lived there for two years, with her parents not being very supportive, and she often has a vivid imagination that the nurses say have always got her into trouble. A teenage girl gives her Sonic, a stuffed toy who comes to life, and he claims he can grant her any wish...Novella, sequel to Schiza.
1. I

There was a small girl, and her name was Annabelle Wayne.

Annabelle Wayne was a bright, fragile girl. Energetic, sometimes broken like a small piece of glass. Her parents always carefully picked up her pieces, hoping that their little girl can be happy again. And she is the next day. Just the small plight of sorrow had to be dealt with, to suffer, so she can live higher the next time. You had to be on the bottom of the ground before you could ever wish to fly.

Annabelle Wayne never had many friends, and even with the few friends she had, they would soon disappear in her grasp, like small eaves of dust in the wind. She wished that one day, she could have a friend with her forever, a friend who could listen to her, love her, and not disappear when she hugged them. Many of her friends did that. They never seemed to want to be hugged forever by the small, angelic Annabelle Wayne. No one seemed to want to stay in her grasp forever. The small grains of sand that would disappear between her fingers, they always somehow got away. And when they got away, she cried those loose, crystal tears her parents always feared. And she wished she had a friend who could store them for her, inside his heart that seemed to have always been full of fibers that glowed.

Annabelle Wayne lived in her parent's mansion. Her parents were rich, never suffering from the hard times, but yet despite everything they gave to Annabelle Wayne, she always seemed to want more. Annabelle Wayne wasn't greedy, but she wanted something that could last her a long time, not the latest iPod, not the latest computer she could use to keep herself occupied from the fact that no one seemed to want to play with her, but something that would always be inside her, something she could remember that she was loved in this world, something that could keep her safe in her mind that seemed, to her, be riddled with disease.

Annabelle Wayne was smart, but she could never find out the riddle to her brain. It always seemed to go out like a small flicker of a flame that died away. She wanted something that could last a long time, she claimed. She wanted, above anything, perfect mental health. But she thought as long as she could live, as long as the pills they gave her seemed to give her these undesirable side effects, she could never escape from the wrath of her mind, of her imagination, and she wondered, oh so wondered, if there would be a friend who could tell her, oh so gently, that there was something special in her mind, that she was wanted in the world, despite her faults.

They told her she was creative, but she wished, so much, just to be normal! Just to be a regular person! Without the mind aches and the guttural pain the medicine brought, with her mouth always seaming loose rhymes and her fingers always in strange formations and her feet always moving and her hands always washed and her eyes always seeing the apparitions, she wished, once and for all, that she wasn't insane, but normal! Not special, like her parents kept telling her! Normal! The girl has lived for so long in the Terre Haute Asylum for the Mentally Ill, and she felt alone, that she was the only child in a world full of adults who lost their vision, their eyes to see the world. Sometimes to her the world was so much more vivid, so much more dull, and she wished it would be vivid all the time, the textures more soothing to her, the voices louder than whispers! She wished so much to be loved, to be liked, other than the woman nurses who she thought was supposed to put up with her, but she was in the quietest vault of Indiana, the quietest place in the world where not even the silence could be pierced by a scream. The silence was louder than a scream. It would get nowhere. It would get to no one. And Annabelle Wayne, she wished she could be heard, she wished she could be seen to anyone other than her parents, other than the other patients who these cruel people have called "loons", she wished she could be heard all over the world, her small little fingers to be touched, her blue eyes to be seen, and her golden locks to be admired. But no one, in all the world, has heard of Annabelle Wayne, and all her troubles. She was quiet in the quietest vault in Indiana, and alone.

The nurses have told her about God, but she didn't believe in him. She thought he must've been a tyrant who only wanted to punish people with these diseases, with his voice that was as sharp as a lightning bolt in the sky, and they told her that when she had troubles, she could pray to him, and he could try to answer her prayers. But she never believed that he could help her. He only wanted to see her suffer. After all, that was why she was here. Sick. Sick with her heart disease that she soon came to believe instead of her brain being diseased, and very soon, she thought she lived in a regular hospital like everyone else, and it comforted her to know she wasn't insane, that her other loons weren't insane but just physically ill, and the nurses with their needles so long and slender, their silhouettes like small little white shadows of long thin cut paper, they gave them medicine to lower their stress so their hearts wouldn't break. Their hearts, so fragile, so little. She came to believe they were born with small hearts, cowardly hearts, and the world has scared them too much, which is why they were here, in this small little white asylum that was the same color as milk, the same liquid used to give to feeble kittens. They were the kittens, wanting to be treated of their hearts, and the medicine, sometimes it made them dumb and dull, sometimes it made them gray into the shadows that cut across the milky halls, as the men drooled on the hearts and spades, as their hands always shook with vigor, as their hearts barely trembled inside them, barely made a sound, as the nurse came in again, her red smile so luminescent in the snowy halls of the battered and weak-willed. She imagined her lips as a bleeding heart, so bloody that she wished it would pull away and kiss someone else with the mark of death, with the stench smelling with ripe bellies opening and the flies sucking on their juices.

She remembered she spent so much time in this hospital that she barely remembered it was near Christmas, and because her heart caused her to be on watch again (oh her heart, always causing her to do such caustic, acidic things to the sweet little nurses, their fairy wings being ripped by her nymph-like hands!), which meant she couldn't see her parents. She barely remembered their faces. They were like blurry pictures to her, little fuzzballs in her hand. While they usually made her smile as they tickled her face, these ones did not, and caused her little heart to beat rapidly again.

The shadows were like long claws, long hooks, ready to bleed into her white silky body.

"It's nearly Christmas, my sick little turkeys and loons, and it's time to open up your presents. These came from your parents, your friends, your other family, and some may have been donated. Only a few of you weren't such little shits that you got the donated presents, which means you, little Annabelle Wayne, you got a present from an anonymous source. I know that girl who gave you your present. She had long brown hair and those hazel eyes that are always filled with lies. She was a real spectre, a real demon from Hell, and you shouldn't open your present too fast, it can make your heart beat too fast. And we don't want you in the Safety Room, do we, little Annabelle?"

She wasn't sure of what she was speaking. It was fast, her words flowing from her breath like long silky snakes, and she thought she heard her say that there was a present from a girl, a girl who possibly felt sorry for her. Maybe a friend, maybe someone who wanted to harm her, bringing a bomb in the hospital. It was possible. She saw white knifed powder that cut and sawed through people's noses and pills that were long white blades that scarred people's throats. And they were forbidden. The nurses kept checking their presents, but sometimes a few harmful ones went through, but young Annabelle Wayne thought in her glass heart that maybe, this one wasn't harmful, but would bring her a new world of hope, a new life in her decaying one.

Of course, her presents from her parents were things she couldn't have in the hospital with her. New electronics. But Annabelle Wayne didn't want that. She wanted something that truly came from their soul, not something to appease her, to promise her what she can have when she would come out of the ward. Because as she thought and thought in her brain that she thought could be as weak as her heart, it might not happen. She could be trapped here forever, in her own little steel-wired prison. She gazed at the windows through the black bars and saw that the sun was bright, white, and everything it touched it gave joy. But the sun was too far away, the bars were there so the sun couldn't come into their ward. The sun was forbidden, she thought. It gave too much excitement in their hearts. So the nurses tried to seal it away. But she could still see it behind the blinds, and oh how much she craved it, how she wished to have some of it on her tongue! She wished she could touch the flowers and feel their fibrous petals and stems, she wished she could see animals and pet their luxurious fur, she wished she could talk to people who understood words and names, and she wished she could travel to places, oh how much the sun promised her what she could have once she got out! Oh how much she wished for it! But she had to stay here. She had to lie in the darkness, in the silent asylum, to have no one hear her voice, her name, nothing about her was known to the world. She wished she could have the world notice her, she wished she could touch all the beautiful things and love them in a life full of love and happiness, but she felt her life was dead, sad, and blue and black.

The present from the one who felt sorry for her. Yes, that present. She couldn't have too much excitement, she told herself. But she held her breath and opened it, and she found a note, and something that she had to hold her heart inside her ribcage, because it did brought her joy, it brought her a little bit of the sunshine that was hidden away by the sheets that ate the light in their fibrous throats.

The note said, written in a lovely, beauteous scrawl:

_To the little girl in the ward,_

_May you find him a big help. He was, during all of my troubled times. He helped me get past all the evil and woe, and I was able to see the light. He was my best friend, and maybe he will be yours._

_His name is Sonic._

Her heart found exuberance in his appearance. The quills that shone like the sunlight she loved on the windowsill, reflecting the vast deep ocean that she always wanted to travel to, the jade eyes that brought upon wishes and promises granted in her soul, that she will be okay, that one day she will be out of the ward, happy and free. His smile, too, was bright, brighter than the sun and the stars, and she wished that all the other nurses could see it, that this Sonic was her own sunshine, her own freedom from this cell, her own friend she could love forever in her arms and never let go, someone who could listen to her, and most of all, he was a friend who could love her back. Most of her other friends never did that. They always never appreciated how her heart, even though it was weak, could be so big. And Annabelle Wayne hugged him into her arms, her tears being wiped by his fur, feeling so smooth on her cheeks.

"Annabelle Wayne, is that what our donor has sent you? A plush toy? We don't know if we would let you have that, young lady. The ones whose hearts are constantly on fire would want to burn it. Or harm it. Or steal it. Those who just don't have their hearts screwed on the right way would want to hurt your prickly friend. We think you can only have it once you leave the hospital."

She held Sonic tightly against her chest, wishing that he could come to life, tell the nurses no, that she wishes he could stay with her forever and always, and as his chest was brushed against hers, she thought she could feel a strong, shining heartbeat inside him thrumming, like small, smooth fingers stroking her, and as she talked to the nurses, she could swear that right when he was in her arms, he was alive, and wanted to love her.

"No…I want Sonic. Please don't take him away Miss Gertrude, I swear that I won't let the pyros near him, or the kleptos, or the socios. I swear that he will be my friend, and that he can make me happy. Isn't that why the girl sent him to me? Isn't that why he's here for me?"

The nurses, like long, white, unmoving needles, began conversing with each other, claiming that the little girl didn't need a friend, that she needed more "therapy", more "medication" before she could have a friend. But as they clamored, they thought that maybe the girl would benefit from having a stuffed animal to sleep with, as they noticed that little Annabelle Wayne couldn't sleep very well at night, because often she had cramps of these feelings known as "loneliness" and "guilt" and that maybe if she could vent to the stuffed animal, it could be beneficial to her "treatment". So the nurses, the long white poles like the long white sticks of cigarettes, they said that yes, she could keep Sonic, as long as the pyros and the kleptos and the socios couldn't get him, and that she was allowed to sleep with him every night, but couldn't have him during group, as she needed to focus on herself and not her toy. And the girl hopped and hooped and hurrah'd, as she could tell that both she and Sonic would be wonderful friends, and that he could tell from the warmth of his heart inside his chest that he truly loved her even though they just met, and that miss Annabelle Wayne finally had a friend who could comfort her for being in the hospital, with her heart so broken and torn, and that maybe it wouldn't be so bad now about her recent "meltdown" that caused her to be sent to the SR and having her away from her parents for three months.

Sometimes, she thought, maybe she didn't care at all about her parents. They always seemed to be so extravagant, so snobbish, ever since she's known them. She wanted to go to the fine and fancy places her parents claimed they were going, but she always had to be taken care of by the maids and nannies, because her heart wasn't in the right place. The surgeries were just performed and the vacation would be too much excitement, and they would leave her behind, and she would be like a dog who misses their owners when they just leave to go to the store, always barking and scratching at the door, wishing they would return. Her nannies were just as cold as her parents, always telling her her fantasies were just make-believe, not at all real, and they would dispense the medication like Pez dispensers, the little sugary pills coming from their necks, hoping she will take them like candy so she can go to sleep.


	2. II

It was soon the time in the ward where all the lights were shut off, and Annabelle Wayne and all the loonies who lived with her were shut off in darkness, with belts and harnesses strapped to their bodies. Even Annabelle Wayne had to have a harness when she slept. Sometimes she had night terrors and would cause such a dischord over these imaginary monsters and creatures her fanciful mind made up, and they would give her something that she knew wasn't Nyquil, but something they called "Haldol". She would immediately go to sleep, dreaming a dreamless sleep for what seems to be many days, many ages, and many generations. And when she would wake up, the world was brand new to her, as if this hospital had experienced its downfall and soon was built with a new one, with new loonies, with new lonely people like her, but unfortunately, she would never have any new friends. Such was always the effects of the Haldol. It never seemed to promise new friendships and new hope, but just a sleep that didn't give her any new worlds to explore.

They dispensed the pills from their necks. Seroquel, Trileptal, Klonopin, and a gummy vitamin. At least the vitamin was sweet. But the pills often left a nasty aftertaste in her throat, as if they would soon form a cancerous lump inside it. She imagined her throat only so small, that soon they would get pills larger than her mouth, and she would have to swallow whole like a snake no matter if she was going to choke on the sweet taste of sanity. The nurses would laugh and drink the Haldol like sherry with drowsy side effects affecting them and just watch as she swallowed all the pills in the world, one by one, all the biggest pills that were given to sick horses and ponies, tranquilizing her so she could no longer dream with her fragile heart, as she could feel it breaking every time the pills went inside her.

The night looked so blue, so aquamarine, like an ocean waiting to be dived into. She wished she could experience the night sky with her own two eyes, seeing the stars shining so bright for her. They blazed like lanterns for all the people in the world, for all the loonies inside their cage, waiting for them to be released, for them to be beckoned from their slumber, their quiet, peaceful world. She wished she could wish upon a star and wish away her illness, wish away her parents being neglectful and not at all loving, wish away the nurses and the medication and the loons being trapped in their beds with stakes and needles stabbing their wrists and their legs, screaming for the pain to end, screaming for Hell to come in a torrent of fire and sulfur and brimstone and take them away from their nightmare.

And she wanted to wish away the nightmares too. The ones she often had of the monsters with sharp, triangular teeth, and the rectangular claws like razor blades and the sphere eyes and the cylindrical horns. Triangles were evil she thought. They must be destroyed.

She unhooked herself from her harness and began formulating plans, of the shapes going to war, the rectangles with their army hats and knives, the triangles with their Nazistic ways, the circles with their Buddhist principles they wish to spread, the squares that were gung-ho and had their rifles and boots, the ovals with their lazy liberalism that they had to not go to war but wait until they were in danger. Yes, the shapes were about to march, and she drew them on her wall with her chalk, drawing the many shapes with their knives and guns and their blood spreading out all over the world, with the violet fluid leaking from the walls and into her bed, into the long drooping shadows that were owned by the cage loonies (but not at all controlled, the malevolent spirits that wished to harm them as they could soon turn into amorphous beings and scratch them with their quartz-rigged claws!), devouring them, the darkness malevolent in its wretchedness, wanting to swallow all the world like a Seroquel pill.

She continued to draw, drowning the whole world in a lush hue of violet, making her room the same color as her favorite flavor of the ice lollies that they gave her in the ward when she said she was being a "good girl", and being reminded of her favorite treats, she suddenly thought of an ice cream world, a world topped with chocolate and cherries, a world so sweet that absolutely no harm could come to it, a world where everything had a flavor, that everyone belonged in their favorite flavor world, and the gods could just cast the world in a frigid case of ice and make it sweet, everlasting, forever encased on her tongue that just simply wanted to know the sweeter things she never was given in this ward, the long silhouetted needles of nurses always taking them away from her, saying that those things were not at all "healthy", or "therapeutic", and she drew the world with chocolate flavored walls that oozed of chocolate chips and mints and cookies, she drew her bed as a vanilla wafer with beans and peppermints, with a long wide silky river of milk that was the same cadmium color of teeth and the walls until they were sauced with the brown crayon, and then the floor turned into pink gushes of sweetness, the strawberry roads to the medicine table, to the nurses' station, to salvation, to sanity and self-control. And she wished she could have her favorite flavor of ice cream, the rocky road to recovery, and she wished she could have it in her grasp, as she wished her crayon could turn into an ice cream cone, and she could lick it until her tongue was satisfied, until it melted into the pink soft concaves of her tongue, into the soft sinews of her heart that was weak and fruitless.

And soon her hand was crooked. Her fingers shot nerves of pain into her body. The color could not wash from the vanilla walls. From the chocolate rivers, the cows and birds drinking milkshakes and eating candy trees made of colorful M&M's, and she prided herself on her creation, as her teeth rotted as she thought of all the ice cream she could eat in this world, and she wished she could paint it with ice cream, with melted long strings of chocolate and vanilla and strawberry, and even mocha and peanut butter and Crunch bar-implanted and ones with Snicker's and ones with Oreo bits, and she wished the hospital had some color, a vivid aura. When anyone entered the hospital, they were not met with the same color of pale sheets of faces, of death and circumstance, of the same color as angel's wings when they took a sick grandmother away from the helpless faces of children, but a bright burst of the colors, of the ice cream flavors that could remind the hospital of the sweetness that was waiting for them when they were released, that life truly was all gumdrops and rainbows, but only if you truly believed in it.

She smiled as she gazed at her creations, her sugarcoated world ready to be devoured by the rest of the patients, the rest of the loonies who had the small hearts, the hearts that she thought could be healed by the sweetness of ice cream, as the loons never had much sweetness in their lives. Just dark, torpid nastiness that tasted the same as the pills that Annabelle had to take. Some had such dark pasts, pasts that little Annabelle Wayne couldn't understand, with their hearts so ready to be pierced and sewed with the nurse's small thin little needles that extended at their fingernails, as she learned about such things called "molestation", "rape", and "murder". She often wonder if other kids her age learned about these things so early, right when they were only shoots growing on the end of a plant's fingers, knowing full well of the dangers of the world right when they nearly bloom. She still had a little bit of her innocence inside her, hidden deftly in that fragile glass heart she tried to protect so much from breaking, but she felt that one day, all the innocence would be drained away by the loonies' lives, hearing their tales of sorrow and heartache and misery. And she was forced to listen, even if she was so small, just only 3 feet high, while the rest were 5 feet, 6 feet, towering over her like the long black pillars as their shadows, covering everything in her world. And she couldn't imagine the loonies' shadows, their darkness inside of them, would take one look at her ice cream and flavored world and eat it all, or tear it all down with their long, odious and fragmented finger claws, and she thought if all the color in the only world she had ever known would be drained out, she couldn't imagine living back to the silk colored walls, the lime-rusted walls in their bathrooms, their toilets being zip-tied even though she had no plans on throwing anything, the windows having those bars she hated that she wished was only black licorice, the bloodied safety rooms, the shit-smelling cotton and pillows.

She wished she was out of here and she could embrace the world outside. She wished she could have the taste of ice cream on her tongue instead of bland mashed potatoes and bland lamb chops and meatloaf. She wished she could hug the sun in her small arms, the golden orb so bright and so warm. She felt so cold in here, as the air conditioner was always turned on, and she always felt she would be frozen on the spot. They were all penguins and polar bears and arctic seals on display at the zoo. She wished she could no longer see the man who continued to clap and laugh and say how well they treat the patients in this hospital, and then he would point and laugh at the small little girl who wished to never be in here for the first place for her small little heart, and say how well they treated the little bitch, the little dick-sucking trash-guzzling prostitute. The man would have a twisted face, horns would grow out of his meaty socketed head, and his fingernails would grow until they were curled and sharp. The man would claim this girl sold her soul and body to have sex for money, and her mother, the one who never cared at all about her, was a whore too, and her father, a drug-dealer who forgot about them and soon was killed by the police. And little Annabelle Wayne would cry, she would say that none of that was true, and she also wished the man was gone, that these anomalies in her world would disappear, she wished, she wished, she wished.

She could hear the nurses walking down the hallway, keys jingling in their pockets, them discussing on what else the brat has done this time, the brat with such a vivid imagination, the brat who needed to be locked up in the Safety Room, yet again she will be met with the smell of blood and shit and piss.

She wished, she wished, she wished…

She hugged Sonic close to her, the plush toy she barely knew much about. But as she squeezed him tightly, his fur felt so soft, so warm, and his glass eyes seemed to look up to her, as his gloved hands wiped away her tears. But she couldn't believe in what she was seeing, not anymore. The world had tricked her many times, and the nurses called these tricks "hallucinations", something that she never was taught the definition of. Sometimes she went up to the other patients, playing a magic trick, and she would just say he was experiencing a hallucination. And immediately, he would scream and flail his arms, saying that he was stuck in Hell, that this demon wench was showing him the secrets of the world with her little felt hat and wand. And the nurses, the long cigarette sticks, they would take the man away to the ECT Room, where they would perform another thing most children shouldn't learn about, called "electroshock therapy".

The nurses' red bloodied lips continued to move in such a strange formation, speaking words she didn't know, that the stupid bitch was at her antics again, that she covered the entire room in her "stupid bullshit".

Sometimes her parents have asked her if any of these nurses have said these things, and she said she wasn't sure. Something told her that these things were also tricks. That she could never imagine the nurses, being so professional, calling a little six year old girl a "little bitch". But she heard it, she heard it with her own little mollified ears!

"Ssssshhh…" she heard. But she wasn't sure where it was coming from.

"That bitch! Look at how she ruined this damn hospital! It was supposed to look so dull, so dreary, so gray! Now she's going to get a pummelin'. Will you ladies care to join me? Let's get the bats and clubs out. Let's beat that shit-for-brains!"

She thought she was so lucky, being as small as she was. She hid in the empty medicine cabinet with her Sonic holding onto her arm, tears forming in her eyes, as the nurses continued to snicker and whisper that they wanted to beat the little girl for coloring the hospital, making it bright and cheery.

"It's not real, Annabelle…It's not real…" she whispered to herself.

She was cornered to one side of the cabinet, her head covering her knees as she held onto Sonic so tight she thought his head would pop, but he remained stitched together, his brilliant eyes looking like jewels, and his smile so piercing to her.

She wasn't sure who Sonic was. She met him only just today. And she never knew the girl who gave him to her. All she knew was that she pitied her, and wanted to give her her favorite childhood toy. Had she seen this girl before in the hospital? Had she seen her with her own little mollified eyes?

"Don't worry about that now, Annabelle…"

She realized Sonic was no longer in her arms.

She looked around in the darkness, as she heard the nurses only pursing their lips and vowing to clean up the mess the next day. "Oh that Annabelle Wayne…she has such an imagination that needs to be kept away! Before her and any of the other patients get any big ideas!"

She was safe. For now. The nurses were now nice and cheery, as she wished they would be all the time.

"Annabelle, you're safe…"

She felt a gloved hand stroke her cheek.

She could feel a pulse inside it. She could feel that it was warm, and full of sweet intentions.

He smiled at her, as she felt the gloved hands pull in her closer, to a tight, kind, warm-hearted hug.

"You're okay with me, Annabelle…"

She looked to those shining jeweled eyes, and she could hear a low, soft hum as he softly rocked her, his quills feeling so soft, like silk, and his hands feeling so soothing, like ice cream during a depressing, rainy day.

"Everything is okay…"

She could hear the other loonies snoring in their beds. She could hear the rainfall beginning to drip down to the earth she always wanted to see. Even though she hated the gray skies and the hidden sun, the sound of rain always seemed to calm her.

"Just like Schiza…" he said.

"Who's Schiza, Sonic?"

"Uh…" He scratched the back of his head, chuckling. "Nobody you really need to know right now. All I can tell you is that I've been brought to you for a special purpose, Annabelle. And I'm going to help you. I'm going to make all your wishes…the wishes where you wished to be out of this hospital, the wish where you wished you get to eat ice cream like you used to, the wish that your parents understood you…I can make all those wishes for you come true. I'm Sonic, your guardian angel, your protector, your help, your…wishgiver."

"Am I really just…hallucinating right now, like what the nurses told me I go through sometimes?" She rubbed her eyes, thinking Sonic would go away at the movement of her hands, like a magic trick. But he was still there, and he still smiled and grinned, patting her back.

"No, you're not hallucinating. In fact Annabelle, you may not seem to realize this, but your illness…although it is hindering you right now by being in this hospital, your illness opens other doors in your mind. It's giving you this great imagination, this ability to see the world in such a different way than these nurses and patients could see, and Annabelle, you have the power to change the world when you get out of here and learn to use your abilities the proper way. I am the Wishgiver, and you are the Creator. We can make anything in this world happen Annabelle, and all you have to do is your creativity, while I use the stars. I pluck them from the sky, and like bright, sharp strings, I can sew anything for you. I can even make you get out of this hospital, and into the outside world that you so crave. So, what will your first wish be, little Annabelle Wayne? You have unlimited wishes, and you have unlimited power thanks to your fascinating mind. What will it be?"

She thought, and thought, and thought about what Sonic said. She realized that nearly everything in her fingertips, everything that she could think of, everything that she had ever enjoyed and ever clamored for…it was hers. And she could simply tell her wish to Sonic, and he would grant it. He would take away a piercing star from the sky, make sure the bladed edges don't stab his hand, and create anything he could from the fragments, from the little glittering and snow white crystals it had as its skin. And Sonic smiled, gently, as he sat near her, wishing to hear her first wish.

"Sonic…I think you already know what my first wish is."

"And it is?"

"I wished…that I would be out of this hospital. And back with my mom and dad. And I have ice cream in the freezer, and my favorite cartoon show I haven't seen for years was on the TV, and I can see all the episodes I missed in one night. And you were with me, in my arms, and we could watch it together. And when we get to bed, you can sleep with me and keep me safe from all the monsters that are hiding under my bed and in my closet. Can you do that for me, Sonic? Can you make that happen?

He nodded, and grinned.

"I surely can."

And when she opened her eyes in that one long, blinding, and white second, she was in her room, with all her scattered toys, looking relieved that she was back in her mansion, and her parents would surely be relieved too, to hear her small voice again, so high and so happy, no longer in that mental ward where they had to put her in harnesses at bedtime with no bedtime kisses, with medication instead of a spoonful of sugar from her mother to get her cold to stop flowing in her body, and she could see the sun and touch it with her white pale fingers and kiss it and make them have color again, like an artist giving paint to a blank canvas she thought. And she could hear the sound of her favorite show that hadn't been on the air in so long since she was gone, Sailor Moon, was now on the face of her screen, and she carried Sonic with her in her small fragile arms as he heard her own fragile heart beat, as her father welcomed her home and gave her favorite flavor of ice cream, Rocky Road, and she watched it with her family laughing and enjoying that their own daughter had just got discharged from the psychiatric ward, and that she was all right, all patched up with the nurses' sewing needles, and that she will be happy from now on. She will be happy with Sonic, her Wishgiver, telling her that anything she had ever hoped for and dreamed was possible, with just the simple words, "I wish".

"Sonic?"

"Yes, my princess?"

She blushed. She never expected Sonic to call her…anything like that.

Her parents never called her a princess. They always just simply referred her to as "Annabelle Wayne". And nothing more. Nothing less, but no sugary-sweet names that she was so accustomed to. The names that so many girls received, but yet, she never had. Little Miss Annabelle Wayne never had anyone call her anything that gave her a big smile, a white flash of teeth that shone like the sun.

"I have another wish, if you don't mind."

"And what is that, dear?"

His smile appeared so gentle, so docile, as he traced his hands over hers, as the little girl giggled, beginning to believe that she was already liking this Sonic. This kind hedgehog who would do anything for her, who would play with her, like her father used to do when he wasn't so bogged down with work, when he saw paper everyday instead of sweet little Annabelle Wayne's face…

He felt her heartbeat, and he listened to it, without saying a word, as he heard her small voice speak.

"I wished you were with me, forever."

"Annabelle…" He continued to attach his hand to her heart, Annabelle believing he was pulling it, feeling it, making sure it wasn't cut with the razor-sharp unkindness of life. And he bandaged it all with a kiss.

"I…might not be able to give you that…"

"And why not?"

Her voice carried a petulant tone. But Sonic was used to this. He got a lot of this from Schiza. He got a lot of this from other girls he protected over the course of many years.

"Because…I really…I just can't be with you forever, Annabelle. It's a bit of a complicated explanation. I don't know if you would be able to understand it, but…"

"Never mind that then, Sonic. Can you give me a bedtime story? Or a lullaby? You can surely do that, can you?"

And again, the smile, the kind, innocent smile Annabelle grew to love, it was back, as he picked up the little girl from her bed, his gentle, warm arms lulling her to a sense of relaxation, as she could see the tips of his jade-cutted eyes, and he rocked her gently, as he sang "Baa Baa Black Sheep".

He could see her eyes becoming dimmer, the eyelids becoming heavier as she reached towards him, stroking his muzzle, petting him behind the ears, Sonic purring softly as he continued to hum and croon, the little girl becoming so softened, so relaxed, her fragile heart put to ease, that she fell asleep in Sonic's arms, and with a kiss on top of the head and a smooth landing on her bed, Sonic tucked her in, and listened to her breathe, contemplating everything about this girl. Everything that he was worried about.

And she went to bed (with no harnesses and no completely pitch-black room, but a nightlight in one corner giving her white veiled luminescence) that night, happy, with a smile on her face. She thought it had been so long since that has ever happened to her, so long ago since she was kissed goodnight by the nicest people in the world, her father and mother and Sonic, the guardian who watched over her that night, his eyes like a hatchetblade through the night, through the monsters who dared to take her away.

But he knew with someone who had so much skill, so much promise, there would be more for her to deal with, more for her to face. And he felt her heart beating, the wonderful colors it was surrounded with, the illuminating creations she had stored inside of her, with both her wonderful, mentally ill brain, and her wonderful, fragile heart that Sonic knew that anything could break it, even such a sorrowful event that he could tell was on the way, that she needed to learn the consequences of having this incredible power, this influence to sway so many people, so many loves and fortunes and lords and gods, like her parents, like the gods that Sonic had to deal with back home. Yes, this little girl was more powerful than Zeus, more powerful than Amaterasu, more powerful than Brahma and maybe even Christ. Her hands had a thousand lightning bolts scarred across it, her eyes sent him a shock down his whole soul, and her brain, how it leaped from once concept to the next so fluently…

The little girl was going to have a terrible, but fulfilling life.

And as she slept quietly in her bed, so soothed by Sonic simply being there for her, he crooned a song for her softly, lulling her to a deep sleep. And he thought she needed all the sleep she could get before he would give her all these tragic, but fulfilling decisions.


	3. III

The Dawn's lovely mouth was opened in the sky. The huge gaping mouth, with the red ruby tongue poking through the golden yew morning, with the trees the black silhouettes against the backdrop, ready to be devoured by light. They were the small reminders of the night, as they appeared completely black, so crooked and so sparse, as winter was soon approaching its end, as the leaves were sprouting small green shoots, beginning to develop large green hands to envelop the world in shade. And Sonic could sniff the pollen in the air, the flowers beginning to bloom with their bright colors, colors that Sonic thought were so ripe and so blinding that they were ugly, especially to Annabelle Wayne, who was fast asleep, even when the dawn rose over the gray moldy hill. The dawn had such a large mouth, the red backthroat as it yawned, as it made the stars hide in their small, golden threaded blankets, and sleep.

But Sonic could still awaken the stars, he could still pluck them like ripe fruit from the Sky Harvest.

He sat back and admired how lovely everything looked when it was in light, not at all like the dark, dismal hospital that he was in that Annabelle Wayne wished to be out of. He was beginning to hate the hospital too, even if he was only there for what seemed to be several hours.

He heard her breath beginning to grow into a larger timbre, as he could tell she was beginning to awaken. One breath in, one breath out. And soon, her eyes poked through his vision, and he kept remarking how they looked as sharp as his, the gems that would soon awaken so many people in this world, the eyes that would spark a revolution.

"Good morning, Sonic," she replied, with a smile. "Can I wish for a breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes and orange juice too? Or would that be a lot to ask for?"

He chuckled, his hands once again feeling the rhythm of her heart, making sure there was nothing wrong, nothing that would make her destroy all these gods, all these…but he never minded that. Her heart rate was normal. "We sure can do that, Annabelle. Anything for you."

And in an instant, one flash of her blinking eyes, there was a tray that had a stack of silver dollar chocolate chip pancakes, along with a small container of orange juice. Sonic put the straw inside it, and she suckled it with glee, while she attempted to swallow the pancakes nearly whole, until Sonic cut them up, allowing her to slowly savor the taste of them. They were the best chocolate chip pancakes she ever had. She imagined that the chips possibly came from Switzerland, while the batter was made by a professional chef who tried to keep things simple and tasty for a six year old girl. Sonic simply stared at the sky as she ate, quiet, without saying a word, as he watched the mouth of dawn open wider, wider, the mouth being bloody, with all the gaped and sharp white flashes of the clouds as its teeth were being examined by a dentist somewhere, possibly God, making sure that the dawn didn't had such bad gingivitis.

But he kept thinking the dawn being so red, so much like scarlet lips, so much like cinnamon hair, he thought, he could tell something was going to happen with this girl, that if he didn't kept her busy, all her creations would come to life, they would damage people, they would hurt, they would kill…

"Sonic, what are you thinking about? Why are you not talking?"

He shook his head, ignoring the daylights. "Nothing sweetie. Is there anything else you wish for right now? Anything at all? I can make it happen you know. I can take you to anywhere you want in the world, I can take you to a theme park, or to a different country, anywhere you want. You just have to say the word."

"But Sonic," she said, as she spoke through a mouthful of chocolate chip pancakes(her parents never teaching her how to not talk without her mouth full of food). "I feel pretty happy where I'm at right now. I'm back home, away from that hospital, and I'm with my mom and dad, and I can watch TV anytime I want, and I can soon go to school. They said they wanted me at a privit school. What's a privit school, Sonic?"

"I think they mean 'private' school, Annabelle, but…there's got to be some place or something you also want. I mean, you can't…be happy here, it's…"

"Of course I'm happy, Sonic." Her eyes, the cerulean glass eyes, they looked like he was staring at the blue clouds and sky, and Sonic could catch a hint of confusion in her voice. He knew she wanted to not be wrong, that this house was such a lovely house for her to live in, that her parents gave her everything she wanted even if she knew it wasn't exactly what she wanted, they gave her goodnight kisses and they gave her bedtime stories, they gave her anything she could out of a parent, but Sonic knew that simply wasn't true, that there were more to these parents that she knew she could never hear and never stand.

And he could never tell her. Otherwise her imagination would get out of control. It would hurt other people. And he would have to do something to her parents that he knew he wouldn't be proud of, like he did with Schiza's father in the past.

His knife still wasn't clean from that deed. He still couldn't wash the blood away from it.

"Sonic?"

He remembered that night too clearly. The night that her father abused Schiza. That there was that disgusting spread all over her bed, as her father simply thought of her as nothing but a sex toy, an object for him to molest.

"Sonic?"

He sneaked in that jail cell, holding onto his Divinity Knife so aptly in his hand, knowing what he had to do. Knowing that God told him to do this awful deed. To spread his blood on the walls, to make him die on his very own cross for his own sins.

"Sonic, are you listening to me?"

He had to stop thinking about it. For now.

He looked back in her blue eyes, and he hoped he never had to tell her the secret of her mother and father. He hoped to remain that buried in the closet, until she was old enough to understand.

"I said I was happy here. I don't need to go anywhere in the world. I'd rather stay here, with you."

He wished he could give Annabelle so much affection, to show her that he cared, to show her that he would always be with her, but the thoughts about Schiza's father, the thoughts about her own parents being who they were, without telling the little girl with the fragile heart the truth, he simply was silent, as he sat in a small, plastic play chair, and he said nothing more.

"What's wrong, Sonic? You don't seem…happy, like you usually are…"

He could hear her parents, climbing up the stairs with their monster feet, tucking in their monster tails, hiding their monster teeth, and Sonic knew it was time to turn back in a stuffed animal. The monster parents wouldn't like it if they saw a real live hedgehog in their dear little misses' room. They would kill it with their one long rake of their monster claws, with their monster guns hidden in the father's pocket.

Guns. He hated them. But nothing was going to change. People would still have them. Especially Annabelle Wayne's father. He lived by guns and died by guns. It was his code of law to have them in every waking moment of his life.

And they arrived, and Sonic was stitches again. Dead, cold, silent, Annabelle Wayne couldn't hear his heartbeat anymore, as it usually rang in her ears, in his chest.

"Annabelle, we decided that to celebrate you coming home from the hospital, we're going to go to the circus! Get ready, we're going to leave in about 20 minutes!"

Annabelle thought she never really liked the circus, and in fact, wished she could stay home for a while, with Sonic. But he was a toy now, with fluff as his mouth, with stitches placed over his lips, with sewn in eyes and small cotton hands. He couldn't tell her parents anything about how Annabelle wanted to stay home and relax for the day, and she never liked clowns and found the circus scary at times. But she understood with one glint of his eyes that he had to remain a secret, otherwise the monsters would strike, to protect their fragile, darling girl.

"Can I bring Sonic with me, daddy?"

"Oh? Yeah, sure you can sweetheart, I gotta call someone and take care of a little business. Can you just get dressed and meet me in the living room in a few minutes? This is a very important call I have to make."

And he left, as soon as he appeared, with his swift, monster-like reflexes. Her mother shook her head, and wondered why he made phonecalls all the time, why he was always so busy at his job.

—-

"You bastard, you were supposed to give me the cash for your fucking meth a while ago! You told me you would pay me back, and well, it's time, buddy. I gotta do a little business over here, but next time you plead with me about how you have to pay me back next week or you'll make a small payment, you don't realize that you're not buying a fucking house or a car. This is fucking meth, and you have to pay when payment's due. I'll be back to collect your cash once I'm done and…"

He held the phone tightly, nearly making its plastic shell crack under his strong, meaty hands. He had to have strong hands for this job. It kept him safe. It kept his reflexes fast to get the little pistol in his pocket. And he wished he could shoot this man, for simply locking his money away, the money he needed to feed his family, the family he never wanted in the first place, the family he hated all except for his daughter, the daughter he wished wouldn't be so crazy, so insane. But the Terre Haute Asylum's bills were so much. And it meant he needed to make more meth, more cocaine, to pay for his dear sweet daughter's hospital visit for two years…

"But I don't have anything! I'm homeless for Christ's sake, and the only thing that I can wake up to is your meth, and I…don't know how I'm going to make your ridiculously high cost for your shit that I can make if I had more money I could throw away. I just…I'll make another payment tonight, but I can't pay you in full. I'll have to…"

"No, damn it! Pay me now in full!" If he wasn't so close to his scum-sucking family, he would've threw the phone across the room. He hated dealing with the homeless, but he needed the money, whatever he could scrape out of them. But today, he needed more money than the homeless old man who was coughing his lungs full of spittle could give him. Not only did the Asylum bill had to be paid, but he also needed more money to make his meth, more cash to get his cocaine out of state, to make the house payment, the car payment, the empire he created by having so much and only doing so little, he didn't want it to topple over and fall because an old, frail, fragile old man couldn't pay him. He didn't care at all about their problems, that their boyfriend said this, their girlfriend said that, that most of his clients didn't at all care about paying him back. They only thought of having the drug in their veins, their thirst being quenched by his high-quality meth and cocaine mixture, that the homeless man he talked to, he simply wanted to snort into his brain and not at all think about paying the man who made it. But as the little girl got closer, and so did his blood-sucking wife, he had to deal with this later, with his hot blade that would cut through his soft skin like cutting through felt, and his pistol would take care of the rest. It would no longer be trapped in his pocket any longer.

He would have to use his gun, his monster claws, to do the talking for him.

"Fine, meet me later, near Nick's bar. Just give me whatever you can handle for tonight. Just remember that for me to make this shit I have to get paid so I can buy more materials, so I can get more of the cocaine off-states. Anyways, I have to leave now. Just give it to me tonight."

And he hung up, flipped the phone in the palm of his hand, and put it in his pocket, his secrets being tucked away from his sweet, little Annabelle Wayne.

Did he call his family scum-sucking? No. Of course not. Not Annabelle. Annabelle was such a precious daughter of his. One he always wanted to cherish, as much as he cherished his cocaine collection, his meth lab, his morphine addiction.

"So, are you ready?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Her father held her hand tightly, feeling all the blood swarming from her heart, hearing the chimes of her heartbeat. They laughed as they told each other simple jokes, as he told her how exciting the circus will be, telling her about The Wizard of Oz's "lions, tigers, and bears" act, and Sonic simply sat inside the wombed soul of the plush, sharpening his blade, eyeing the father to make sure he wouldn't make one wrong move on poor, sweet, little Miss Annabelle Wayne.

The blade wasn't yet clean. It still rotted with the blood of Schiza's father. Sonic thought with all these years he had been with these little girls, protecting them, guiding them, making sure they knew that God cared and loved them, he was beginning to hate their fathers, who towered over them like the beasts they were, like the wolves they were, picking apart his fragile little lamb's meat.

The lion will make sure the wolf will die under his claws. He will make sure of it, as he put the blade away, and watched her father closely. And he wished he could say that if he put one nail on her head he would kill him. He would stab him until all his body was nothing but holes. He would make sure all the blood was drained out of his body. He would make sure his wrists were raked clean of blood.

He would make sure of it. Oh, he will make sure of it.

—

The bloody mouthed sun soon hid away in the hands of God, his cloudy hands being gasped in its throat, choking, hiding away into the distant hills. Annabelle looked beyond to try to find the sun, but couldn't see even its' bright, sparkling face that she had grown accustomed to since she left the Terre Haute hospital. Now they were going to the Shriner's Circus, with her father driving their truck, as he continued to hum the tune to a Supremes' song, his finger constantly tapping at the wheel. Annabelle continued to stare at the raindrops that stretched their wings across the screencanvas, making the entire can trapped in a film of silky water.

She talked to Sonic, even if she knew he wouldn't reply. Even if she knew her father (the monster) would think she was strange for it, that she needed to go back to the hospital to have her fragile heart fixed. She tried to see if there was any sign of Sonic breathing inside the plush, his eyes blinking, his heart beating, anything for him to be alive again, but she wondered if Sonic left and he wasn't coming back. She wasn't so sure that Sonic could transform from a plush toy to a live hedgehog so effortlessly, so quickly.

"Sonic…are you there? Are you sure I'm not…" She whispered the words quiet enough so her father wouldn't hear. "…imagining things?"

Sonic was still silent, a stitched upper lip. She wondered if he had to always remain a stuffed animal away from her parents. And she thought she couldn't imagine it, just to have him completely quiet when she thought an…episode was going to come on. That's what the nurses always called them. "Episodes".

"Say Annabelle, why do you talk to your stuffed animal so much? He won't answer back, you know that, darling."

She could imagine his teeth would be crawling with maggots and beetles, as every time he spoke, she could hear a crunching of their carcasses, and her father would taste their juices that were hidden away in their shells. She thought Sonic was telling her of how much of a monster Daddy was. With the pistol in his pocket, with the fangs and the claws, with the eyes that appeared slit in the light. But she tried to concentrate more on reality, that her father was here, and he would never harm her. He would never harm a single hair off his precious daughter.

"You've never been to the circus, Annabelle. You were always just locked up in that cage in that mental hospital, waiting for the nurses to stick needles in you. And they fed you intravenously too I bet, right Annabelle? You're never going to the hospital again, not on my watch, not while you're healthy now. I just can't imagine my daughter being in a place like that, to be treated like an animal. 'Don't give her too much excitement, Mr. Wayne? Pah! Tell me how to raise my daughter! Tell me how to raise little Annabelle Wayne when I'm a good father, isn't that right dear?"

"Well, they weren't telling you you were a bad father. They were just saying that too much excitement can be such a taxing toll on her. I don't know if she even wanted to go to the circus, until you suddenly had this idea that we had to celebrate by going to this circus that's in the middle of nowhere and you wanted her to have her first experience of the circus to be such a good time with her father…Edward, have you ever asked what our daughter actually wants instead of just placing these ideas in her head?"

He simply grinned, his smile like the open gash on the cut of a blade, and he said, "Of course I know what our little daughter wants. She always wanted to go to the circus. She always wanted to be like every other American six year old and experience all kinds of things, right? She needs to be free, her childhood is so fleeting, she needs to have a happy life, and not stuck in that damn hospital all the time. She was stuck there for two years Cassandra! She was four when she went inside. A four year old, in an insane asylum? Does that even make sense? I know she's not crazy, Cassie…our daughter is the perfect six year old that anyone could ever want. She's smart, nice, and she wants to be such a strong woman when she grows up. Is that right, Annabelle?"

"Annabelle?"

"Annabelle?"

No, she couldn't imagine herself being the idolized six year old her father was making her out to be. She couldn't imagine herself being Daddy's Little Girl, like he always wanted.

She felt herself being alone in her house. Her father always left for work early in the morning and didn't come back until 11 at night. Her mother left in the afternoon, and she would be alone at night, with all the creatures scratching her door, with their teeth shining in the moonlight. She wished that Sonic could prove him wrong, that she never felt she had a father, she never felt she had a mother either, it was always just her, and in the future, she would always have Sonic. She would always have his wishes at his disposal, and she would always have his hugs and kisses. Her father's always tasted like champagne and sherry. And she hated it.

Was her father a drunk? Was he a regular 'wino' that she heard her mother once call him? There never seemed to be any fights between them, as her father would speak with a slurred accent, his tongue always falling in the wrong places, his lips always danging in front of him, while her mother would have the stench of hash on her, which Annabelle heard was called "pot", as she once saw the joint rolled up between her Mommy's diaphanous fingernails, and ignited to life with the flicker of a match. And instantly, her eyes drooped and sagged, and she laughed as if all her worries melted from her like a green saggy liquid, her old snakeskin.

She imagined her mother as a serpent sometimes. Slithering in the house. Licking the air with her pointed tongue. She had fangs too, but rarely used them against her father, especially when he was being the monster he was, the one with the fangs like moon crescents, the eyes like pointing fingers that would launch against her.

She wondered if Daddy had a secret agenda, and so did her mother. She wondered if Sonic would protect her from them, that maybe they would wish to kill their daughter, that they would feed her intravenously with a black tar liquid, injecting it inside her, rotting her insides, rotting her eyes.

Her "episode". It was beginning to arise like the bloodied sun from Hell.

She could feel it open up, as the blade got inside her wounds, deeper, deeper, deeper…

"You fucking slut!" Her father was unmasked, with his slackened jowls, his buttonholed eyes, raining with blood and piss. She wanted to crawl back inside her seat, she wanted to run from the van and into the road, back to her home she knew she owned to herself, faster and faster until her legs were just as fast as Sonic's, until she could go back home and watch Sailor Moon and eat her cherry chocolate ice cream, and go to bed with Sonic giving her a goodnight kiss, with him rocking her gently with a sweet lullaby, she just wanted to go home and have Sonic treat her like an infant again, until she was soothed and away from this terrible nightmare that her brain was conjuring up. She hugged Sonic and cried into his plush fur, as her mother spoke, with her mouth as wide as an alligator's her eyes crusty and full of sand.

"We're at the circus, Annabelle! We're at the circus! Come one, come all, let's have some fun, at the circus! Circus!"

She talked like a high-pitched, squealing child. Her father had nails the size of machetes, as he tried to comfort his little daughter, but she feared being cut on them, she feared the clown that was by their door, with his organs ripped open, his body bleeding and his heart beating and his stomach still producing gastric acid, and his eyes were blackened holes, into a universe that Annabelle wished she couldn't see, as she held Sonic tighter, tighter, and wished that all of this would simply go away.

"Make the little whore have fun at the circus! Braise her in juices and make sure you eat the lamb until there's nothing left of her meat! Out back, out back!"

The little lamb was frightened, and she kept reaching for the lion, the lion to come rescue her from her plight.

She wondered if Sonic would ever come back again. She wondered if he left her for good.

They parked the car, as more atrocities began to line up, the elephants with razor-teeth with the hatchet nose, the tigers with a labyrinth as their stripes, a bear that always held such a wide grin, and grinning eyes, but she could tell it was breaking inside, that the bear was soon going to kill everyone with his grizzly claws in such a grisly way.

"Let's go to the circus, Annabelle! Let's go to the circus!" Her father kept tucking her away inside the tent, her body being eaten alive by mosquitoes, the smell so strong that Annabelle had to cover her nose to shield herself from the horse shit stench, and she tried to pull away her father's arm, as she no longer wanted to be in the circus, but she even wished at this moment that she was dead, and never had to experience her father's rash decisions again in her life.

So many tormented faces, she thought. So many tortured souls that were inside this tent, that reeked of mosquito-water and animal shit, that the rain continued to pelt the tent as she saw so many bloodied faces, so many grinning and insanity-reeked faces, so many sad melancholic faces and faces that wished to get revenge. The clowns, they tried to get a laugh out of her, but she only begged and cried to be let out, as they continued to call her a slut, and she kept holding onto Sonic, to be let out of this hellish dreamworld she made and back into her home, or even the mental hospital, because she was sure she needed her meds again, or her intravenous food!

The clowns cackled, as they brought on a monkey on a tricycle, the little chimpanzee looking like he was going to die tonight, as he was so weak, so frail, his ribs poking through his chest, and she wondered if this circus even fed their animals properly, if they even fed the clowns properly except feeding them the meat of six year old girls.

"Sonic!" she cried.

There was no response, except an innocent smile.

"I wished I was out of here!"

There was still no response, as one bloodied clown ran towards her, and gave her a venus flytrap to squeeze.

"Sonic, please get me out of here!"

She felt her glass heart wasn't able to take it anymore. She could feel it crackling, shattering, while these clowns got closer to their precious lamb, as the lion continued to sleep…

"Please Sonic I mean it, get me out of here!"

She closed her eyes, while she held onto Sonic closer to her chest, until their hearts were entwined by their vined veins.

Your wish is my command.

She opened her eyes.

She was back in the hospital bed, with the harness strapped to her body.

It was about midnight, and she wondered how long she's been here.

How many hours passed by? Was she back in here because her parents deemed her insane, and she was once again admitted?

She was back in the same hospital that she was in for two years.

"Sonic?"

She expected an answer, but found nothing out of the darkness.

"Sonic, are you in here? Hello?"

She heard the nurses by her door, chattering away as they did checks on each of the patients, making sure they weren't sneaking around or were screaming at night with terrors, as Annabelle knew some of the loonies did every other night.

"Oh dear, she's still…thinking that her Sonic plush is real…"

"Those anti-psychotics must not be working for her. We'll have to administer some during the morning and at night. The Seroquel has to be stronger."

"What if she needs a stronger medicine? Like…Haldol?"

"Haldol for a young girl? You can't be saying that…"

"But she's imagining all these things, Carol! She imagined this Sonic being her "wishgiver", and she was screaming so loud in that circus tent that her father had to take her away and send her here again…although her father I can tell doesn't want her here. He wants her happy, like most six year old girls are…"

There were a lot of six year old girls who weren't happy, Annabelle thought to herself.

She shivered. She thought the hospital was so cold, especially in the fall. The nurses didn't even had the courtesy to wrap her up in a blanket before they strapped her in here, to keep her 'calm'. But she knew she wasn't calm. She was lying awake at midnight with so many other patients next to her, with the harnesses on their wrists, sleeping dutifully despite the large danger that was inside the hospital, the nurses sucking them of all their life, all their joy…

And suddenly, Annabelle smiled. She saw him, and she wasn't imagining things after all.

He unhooked the straps, as he laid a blanket across her small, cold body, and he wrapped her up tightly, as he said, "I don't want you to catch a cold."

Annabelle felt so warm, so comforted, her body brimming with warmth as he showered her with kisses on her head, and then he sidled the bed away from the room, into the long hallways that Annabelle thought Sonic could never get into, and as she watched as all the white tiles and all the white lights were being absorbed by the encroaching darkness, she asked, "Sonic, where are you taking me? Out of this hospital?"

He smiled widely, and said, "Yes. I'm taking you out of here."

Soon she could see the screen doors of the exit coming apart, freeing Sonic and her away from the Terre Haute Asylum, and they were greeted with the star-sprinkled night, and the wind from the afterrain felt so soothing, as it brushed away her hair and let her see the vast world beyond her, the world she was locked away from for two years and a day.

"I wished that we had a house of our own, Sonic. A house where we could live in, and we could play in, and could do anything we ever wanted, and no one could say anything, not even this hospital."

He nodded his head, and laughed.

"Your wish is my command. It is done, my little sweet Annabelle."

And she was greeted with light again.


	4. IV

"Your daughter is missing," they said, as the nurses inspected the room with the tied up patients, where the bed that Annabelle was in was gone, vaporized in a cloud of smoke. Her father asked them if they had any leads as to who took her, but the nurses were clueless. They only knew that she disappeared late last night, her bed seemingly missing. The Asylum had such high security that they wondered if anyone the little girl knew came and took her away, someone who knew how to get through the doors that locked when someone entered or left, someone who knew the hospital well enough to get through all the nurses with complete stealth. Her father knew of no one who wanted to take his sweet Annabelle Wayne away. He knew no one who wanted to take away her health and steal her to do God knows what (he feared sexual abuse, or becoming a sex slave, or a ransom). He told the nurses that they were awful guards to have something like this happen, that it would be all over the news, that they wouldn't live with themselves if this little girl was raped or murdered. He began to point his finger at every one of them, claiming that they should all be fired for this costly error, and that he will sue them for every penny this hospital made.

"I will find Annabelle! I will clean up the mess that you bitches made, and I will make sure she will get back home safely! My poor girl, trapped under this man's rule, a victim of child slavery, or even a murder! I will make sure this hospital will get sued! I will make sure all of you bitches will never get a job again because of this!"

Cassandra pulled him away, his tweed jacket nearly ripped from his back as he raved about how the nurses had very lazy eyes, their eyes always drooping to the floor to the point where they almost fall from their sockets, and this is why she was missing. He said that she will be safe once they find her, that the police were doing everything in their power to trace her down and keep her safe away from this man who threatened his sweet little dear Annabelle Wayne's life.

"You don't understand Cassie, these…these…bitches…these bitches!"

"Stop calling them bitches, Edward. These nurses helped our daughter before, and I'm sure they feel bad for their errors. We'll find her, don't worry. They couldn't have gone far."

"Of course they have! I know of criminals who take these children far away from here! Like, about three states away! She can't possibly be safe! I want her in my arms, right now, I want her safe, I want her secure, I want her to be with her father, and away from that godawful hospital and back home! I don't understand why she has to be in there again. You suggested it, and I put her in there, and now look at what these stupid bitches just did!"

"Her symptoms are not getting any better, Edward. She's still suffering from her schizophrenia. She's still having her little episodes. She needs to go back in there once we find her. She needs more help than ever, and they're not finding the right treatment for her. For God's sake Edward, they might even put her under ECT."

Cassandra could tell that his hands were beginning to shake, his entire body was hyperventilating. He couldn't imagine not having his daughter. She knew he loved her. Sometimes she thought he loved her too much. She knew if there wasn't a law between them he would've murdered all the nurses, murdered maybe even the loonies too, for keeping his daughter locked away, surrounded by men and women who didn't know her name, and possibly even abused by the pedophiles he knew these asylums had. The nurses never thought of separating them from his little girl. His little world that he had to keep safe and in harmony in his arms.

"She's six years old! She can't possibly have ECT at such a young age! Or even be in a hospital for so long…Cassie, I'm so worried about my daughter…she's still having these episodes, and she's gone and off to God knows where from some bastard who's probably asking for ransom money or something…I love her Cassie, I can't imagine her being gone from my grasp, being hurt again…I want her back."

She nodded, as the rain streamed on the windows, the smaller drops being devoured by the larger ones, like slugs with wide open mouths that swallowed the others whole.

"I know. But we can't just wish for her to come back. We have to find her, and we have to trust the police in what they're doing. I'm sure we can find her before anything bad happens to her. We can't keep worrying about this and imagine the worst has happened to our daughter. Maybe she's okay. Maybe someone who had no evil intentions at all picked her up. But the more we stress out and worry, the less we'll be able to find her."

"You're always so calm, Cassie. The hell is up with that."

He listened to the sounds of the raindrops smacking the screens, the sounds of the cars passing by with rainwater under their tires, the sound of the wind blowing, whistling the harmonies of the rain. He thought it was talking to him, singing a lullaby that sounded strangely like "Baa Baa Black Sheep".

"But you don't understand how serious this is. I'm one hundred percent sure that someone who picked her up did have evil intentions in mind. I really don't think it would be my father, her grandpa, who wanted to take her to his house, teach her all about how wonderful Catholics are…I'm sure if I met him again, he would do that. I'm sure he's going to tell me I'm not raising my daughter right. My father, he tries to be a good man but I know he just forces that on me. I never wanted to be Catholic. I never wanted to be religious. I just…wanted to live my life the way I want to. Protecting my daughter."

"Your father can't possibly have thought about picking Annabelle up, would he? I mean, he's all the way back in Minnesota…"

"I'm sure he would've, Cassie. I'm sure he would've wanted to save my children with the backhand of God. That bastard…I don't know if he did this, but if he did, I thought I was rid of him so long ago. I can't imagine seeing his face again."

He could imagine more of his hairs becoming gray, his teeth withering, his eyes becoming baby-like. Like his father. The look that he always hated. He wished he was like Dorian Gray, never having to age. Never worrying about being 80 at 30 years old.

He could feel the trigger to his pistol being squeezed lightly, as he thought of his father back in Minnesota, what seemed to be many eons ago…

—

"Son, do you know why Adam and Eve were ashamed of their naked bodies?"

He wasn't sure why.

He always looked at his naked body and never felt ashamed. In fact, he was proud of it. He even thought of having sex with a few women before, but he knew his father wouldn't like that, being a Catholic, believing all sperm was sacred. Believing that using condoms was a waste of time or evil.

"I don't know," he said.

His father grinned, almost seeming to be docile. "You don't know, hm?"

His reaction was simply just to grin back, to show him that he understood what he was saying, that his jokes were funny, that he agreed with him. But he knew in a moment, his father wasn't going to laugh anymore.

"Son, it's because Satan has influenced them to eat one of God's fruits, and that has caused sin and agony to appear. You're smiling now because you don't understand what that means. You're just trying to show me that you agree with me, when in actuality, you don't. You don't understand any of these things, no matter how much I try to teach you them, and you seem to be skipping on Bible school. Can you tell me why you are, Ed?"

He couldn't find a reasonable answer. But his smile was wiped away by the palm of his father's demeanor, and he thought now he had to tell him the truth, otherwise his father was going to try to smack the answer from him with his old, wrinkled hands with the blue veins riveted through his wrists, even if he was only about 36 years old.

"Because I find Bible school boring. I just want to hang out with my friends like most kids do. I don't really want to spend that time studying a book that is about thousands and thousands of years old. Its stuff probably doesn't apply to us anymore."

His father smiled again, that white bladed smile that he soon grew to abhor. "Ah, so you find Bible school boring, eh? It's what we did for many generations, son. We just studied our asses off and it got us to some pretty good places. I'm CEO of a very successful phone company, and I study my Bible every night and every morning. I want you to have some good values son, that's all I wanted. I just wanted you to be a good boy, to be a man any father can be proud of."

"I don't want to be," he stated, his voice flat, monotone. "I just want to be…want to be…want to be…"

"What the Sam Hell do you want to be, boy?"

"Just me!" he pierced. "I just want to have my own life, my own kids, my own girlfriend and wife, without you telling me what I can't be and what I can be! I don't want to be involved in this high, fancy life you have! Your wonderful life that I don't want! I don't want to be the average American with the white picket fence and a dog and all that, I just want to be who I want to be, without you constantly watching over me! I'm sick of it! I don't want to study some book that doesn't apply to our life anymore and go through all these hoops and leaps just to please you! Just…please don't force me into these roles you want me to be anymore when they don't apply to me. I just want to be what I always wanted to be, which is just a regular person working at a regular 9 to 5 job, having a regular kid and a regular wife. You know why? Because I don't want your fancy-shmancy life. I don't want to wear a plastic mask with that smile forever imprinted on my face. I don't want to go to church everyday and act like I'm this haughty and rich and pure person who's never done anything wrong! And that's just how I'm going to live!"

He felt his father was just as disgusting as a viper, with its jagged teeth, with its turpentine eyes, with its serpentine ways that convinced Eve to eat the apple.

His father was the main reason his paradise was gone, his little Eden.

He forced him into everything. The soccer games, the debate team, he worked his ass off to be nothing he wanted to be. He was doing everything to become a fake. Becoming plastic, death.

As he watched his father's blue holed eyes, he grew to hate him. He grew to hate his genes. Even at the age of 17 he could find a few feathers of gray hair, maybe a wrinkle or two in his eyes. A progressive aging disease. He knew he was going to be old like him, in only a few years, and he hated him, because he was becoming him.

He could hear the belt beginning to unravel. He knew he wasn't going to be abused this time. He had a plan. He was lucky that he was right next to the front door, where his father was possibly so wrought with his senility at 36 years old, that he didn't care if even the police saw him smacking his son with a belt.

He wondered if he was going to get that old at 36 years old. To the point of not caring that he was abusing someone, his mind rifled with dementia.

"Well son, I hate to do this, but I gotta teach you…I gotta teach you…"

He was already bald at 36 years old, his face was already a stretched wrinkled paper at 36 years old, and his eyes already had that baby innocence, even if he knew he wasn't so innocent, with his father hitting him just to be "taught a lesson" about the Bible. His father was old in his morals as old as his face, as they didn't eat shellfish, though when his wife was having her period she always remained near him, smiling that caustic plastic smile that Edward soon grew to hate. His father divorced his first wife, without believing that you always had to remain through her in sickness and in health, till death did they part, but he never knew his mother, and he never heard his old, wrinkled father ever speak of her. Just simply his trophy wife Michelle, who had that rosy grin, that bloody face mask, and from what he heard about his mother and the rumors about her from other places that were simply whispered in his unintended ears, was that she was schizophrenic and locked away at the Minnesota State Hospital. He could visit her, but he knew he didn't want to, because he wanted to fly away from his nest, fly away from his grandpa father and from his beautiful cellophane wife and to another state he knew he wouldn't give a rat's ass about, a state they affectionately referred to Indiana.

And to have even worse genes, the linger of schizophrenia in his brain, he grew more afraid of his family, and he wished he could detach himself from his blood lines, into someone else's.

Life never worked that way.

He was going to become a Hoosier, someone who lived in a state that didn't exist to the rest of America.

He took so much money from his bank account. He knew his PIN number and how much he usually stowed away. He knew right when he would find out his money was stolen, Grandpa Dad would change his PIN, but he knew he wouldn't bother calling the police on his son.

His son, a criminal, who took from him 550,000 dollars. And he had all that, in cash, in his duffel bag. He was ready to leave this awful, senile place that smelled of beer and piss and old medication.

His father already had heart and cholesterol problems, at an age where people thought you were alive and vivid and free.

But his father was becoming a cold dead gray, already at 36.

He imagined himself as old as his father, already wrinkled at 36, already with frail hands that hurt so much, already with the belt at his torso, ready to hit his 17-year-old son as if he was a petulant child.

He was ready to leave. He opened the door with his duffel bag carrying his father's 550,000 dollars, and he knew he wasn't ever going to turn back. He wasn't going to acknowledge his father, he was going to hope he wouldn't have a white head full of snow at 36, he hoped he wouldn't be swallowing a river of medication at his age, and he said only one word to him, as he touched the doorknob with his fingers he feared would become as brittle as his father's.

"Goodbye."

He still held the belt so firmly in his hands, his wrinkled fingers shaking, his blue baby eyes beginning to form tears. He was like a baby again, at 36 years old, as he wondered how his own son could do this to him, how he could rob him blind and start a new beginning without him.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You better be. I won't be back. I'll be starting a new life. I'll have a child and wife, without you constantly telling me what I'm doing wrong. I would prefer it that way, Dan."

He no longer called him his father. And his father no longer called him his son.

"Bye Edward. Have a fun life."

It's been ten years since he left his father.

He thought his wife was going to let go of the steering wheel, her fingers so hooked into them, so sweaty, so hurt, as she thought over his past.

"You changed your name and you never met your father again. You moved to Indiana, where he wouldn't bother finding you. Because here in Indiana, it's a forgotten land. No one really remembers this place. But I did the same thing, Edward. I left my father and mother too. I didn't change my name, but I knew they wouldn't care to see me again and they wouldn't be searching for me either. My father was an awful man. At least yours was highly successful and cared about you at least a little."  
"Yeah, but I can't stand knowing I'm related to him." He pulled out a Camel cigarette, flickered the flame on his lighter, and began to smoke. He always had to smoke in a car ride. He never did it near Annabelle, but he still shook from the lack of cigarettes in his system from being with her. That was the sacrifice of being with his lovely daughter. The daughter he raised himself, without his father's help.

"He's got a disease where his age rapidly catches up with him. I think I'm beginning to get a few gray hairs, even though I'm only 27. I wonder if I'm going to be as old as him when I'm 36. Even older when I'm 40. Nearly dead when I'm 50. They said my father isn't going to live past 50, but yet he's still here, but he doesn't have a lot of time left. And I still haven't visited him in so long. He might die without me seeing him at all. Isn't that sad that I don't care about my father? Because he would force the Bible on me with his belts, and the teachers would often hit my hand with rulers, even though this is the modern era, no longer the damn '60s. They always had me try to remember all this shit that I knew no longer applied to us, and even if I might one day believe in God (maybe), I wouldn't think of myself as Catholic. Or any of the sects really. They seem to be all wrong."

Cassandra grabbed his carton of cigarettes, got out a long thin stick, lit, and blew a cascade of smoke that warmed them from the cold, rainy day that nearly stuck out to their jackets and hoodies.

"My father…I hated that bastard. Did you know that he abused me? Molested me? I could never forgive him, even when he's dead and cold in the ground. He always drank. He would drink an entire bottle of wine, a pint of vodka, things that would get anyone completely drunk, yet sometimes I still thought he still had a rational mind, that he knew what he was doing, and he didn't even had one inch of regret for what he did."

Her words were hollow, cold as the cold rainy day, and she wished that the cigarette was her joint so she could relax about thinking about her father's abuse, but she always thought that he was everywhere, always scraping his eyes to look for her, to abuse and rape her again. She wished he was dead, but ever since he left, he went to AA and tried to rebuild his life. Without her. Without thinking about the damage he caused to his daughter.

—

"Whore," he said. "Slut."

Her body was so old, so crooked, but yet he took advantage of it, even though she was only 14. Her bare, diaphanous skin was always seeped away of their purity. Her mouth was always vile, so dirty, she wished she could wash it with soap without the disgusting aftertaste. Her fingers had to touch dirty things. Things she never wanted to touch, even if many years later she had sex with her husband, Edward.

Oral. Is that what they called it? It sounded like such a hideous word. She never wanted to say it. It conjured up images of her father. She was raped with her mouth. Her mouth that had the plasticine appearance, the rosy lips that she never wished to see, that she wished she could wash away in the shower, but the blood still remained. The semen still remained on her lips too.

God has forsaken her for all her life. She was abused and tortured for many years. It was until she was 16 that she left, as soon as she got her driver's license, that she drove away from her drunk father's cavern and into Indiana, away from Michigan, the state of Hell. In fact, she even lived in a place called Hell before she left to the Phantom State, the state without anything interesting inside it, without legs and without arms. There were no gods in Indiana too. While in Michigan, she knew that Satan lived not in Hell, but Detroit.

Her father was always thirsty. He always drank, and drank, and drank. Bottles of sherry and champagne would be devoured by his mouth that wasn't raped but evil with his twisted kisses. He sipped vodka during work. He claimed it made him function. He claimed it made him go through the work week.

But there was his rages when he came back home. He hit his wife several times, to the point that after Cassandra left, she left him too. And he claimed she was the love of his life, not his small, cherubic lolita named Cassandra, who he continued to ravage. He thought of her as the garden of Eden, so pure until he tasted Satan's apple.

She wished when he saw one of his pistols that she would've shot her father. Although she considered the possibility of her father one day using the gun on her if he ever got pissed enough, she never touched it, and let it lay, touched by the dust of God's eyes.

The only thing she could do was escape one day, as she stared at the window, as she saw all the happy people walking outside, playing. All the preteens having fun in the sun. But she never had fun. She never had friends except for Edward. She never even knew anyone who could stand her, not even her daughter, who she loved, and wanted to raise her child better than her mother, who was so passive to realize she was being abused, and definitely more than her father, who never cared about her, and only thought of her as a commodity to his delirium.

She cut the ignition with her key, and she knew she would be much happier without him, without this bastard of a father.

And she soon realized he was happier without her, as he soon tried to rebuild his life without his daughter. Believing that the alcohol caused so much damage, so much pain, that he never had his own daughter, his own wife tell him that.

"Fuck him!"

She turned the key.

Her organs were crawling with insects. She imagined worms digging in the trees of her lungs, the beetles in the carcass of her heart, the maggots in her intestines. Her insides were slowly roasting inside her, slowly turning black, charred, creosote and ashy. She never thought of her insides as alive as soon as her father touched her with the fingers of death. She thought they would spill out of her at any moment. So sometimes she would wear a corset, to keep them inside. Sometimes she wrapped them with Saran-wrap. Bandages. She wished they would stop trying to crawl out of her, but she had to blame her father for that. She had to blame her mother for that too, for never acknowledging what was going inside her satin and pink bedroom.

The car roared to life.

She left. She ran away. She never wanted to see him again. She hated him. She wished he would choke on her mouth. She wished her tongue was a dagger that she could use to cut out her father's tongue. He never deserved it anyways. He never deserved to speak.

The car drove out of his home, and into God Knows Where.

She drove for so long. She was going to drive until she ran out of money to pay for gas. She wanted to run so far from her father that she didn't care if she even drove all the way to Canada, drove all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, to Mexico, to Brazil. She just wanted to get away from him, from his ripe fingers, from his mouth covered in rotting meat.

It was early morning, in the dawn of summer when she ran out of money running away, and she was stuck in Terre Haute, Indiana. She saw the Terre Haute Asylum for the Mentally Ill next to her still car, out in the cold whispers of morning, out in the pink rimmed dawn with the stars glittering through the turpentine glass, and she thought she needed to go there. She was probably insane, to want to drive to Canada to get away from her father. To think her insides were dead. But she couldn't shake that belief from her head. As many times as she hit her head on the steering wheel, trying to keep herself awake, she couldn't stop being so crazy, that her father infected her with this madness. She thought she would soon begin drinking, soon abusing anyone who wished to be with her, soon making herself drenched in wine and champagne.

She was awake for 36 hours. She thought she should admit herself in the Asylum, just so she could get a goodnight's sleep on their Haldol and Thorazine.

It was until she met a man, with a few white hairs in his jet black head, wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a Camel cigarette, saw her car, approached her with confidence that she admitted to herself that she wished she had, and as he pulled out the long drag of his cigarette, his voice looking like a smoky ghost, he said, "Hey, you've been sitting there for a couple of hours now, trying to stay awake. Do you want me to drive you to my place? You seem really stressed out, Jesus Christ your eyes are black. You need a good rest in my house, not this insane asylum. I'm sure you don't belong there, babe."

And for the first time in what seemed to be so long, she smiled.

"My name is Cassandra. I appreciate the offer, but…I think I need a couple of their strong ass medicine to put me to sleep. I've only slept 6 hours in four days. Just…it's a long story, I can't tell you. I really need to…"

"I thought about coming here too, but turns out I changed my mind." He snuffed out his cigarette, the small lines of silver smoke beginning to crinkle and dissolve, and he smiled back, as he told her his name. Edward.

"I ran out of gas and I got nowhere to go. I ran out of money. I just…drove for so long with so little sleep that I just…don't know where I'm going…"

She knew she wanted to go to the land of God Knows Where, but she wondered if it was a land she made up in her head. Her head always seemed to create so many imaginative things that she wasn't sure exactly if they were real or not. They seemed absurd, but realistic. Surreal.

"Then we can just call someone to tow away your car and you can get it later and you can come to my house and have a nice coffee and talk about our drama. Sound good to you? Or maybe getting some damn sleep, I mean…"

She thought she had no choice. She had no health insurance and no money, so they wouldn't be able to keep her very long in the Asylum, and this Edward appeared to be loaded. He had about 500,000 dollars in the bank (Where he got it, she never asked.) He promised later tonight he would take her to a nice restaurant and they could discuss why they came to this shitty state and talk about their shitty fathers and talk about possibly building a brand new not shitty future together, without their parents conspiring everything for them.

And she said she would like that, as he pulled a blanket from the back of his van and a pillow, and as they drove as the summer began to get hotter, the sun rising and opening its golden eyes, she fell asleep, listening to talk radio discuss about the governors running in Indiana, not that she cared any damn bit.

"You know what's one thing I never understood though, Cassie?" he asked.

"What?" The cigarette dangled from her lips, like bits of paper stuck through her bloody corpse. The ashes in her death, ever since her father had devoured her.

"Why do you always wear corsets? Why do you always wrap up your body? I think you look great. You don't have to do that."

She had to.

To keep her life together. To keep her marriage with Edward together. To keep her love for Annabelle, wherever she was, inside of her, so her heart wouldn't pop from her chest and roll its arteries and veins to the world.

"Why?"

And she told him as they kept driving to find their daughter, their sweet miss little Annabelle Wayne, that she didn't know.

And although she tried to keep herself calm, she wished the same would never happen to her daughter. She hoped she was safe, and in good arms.

And not with a rotting dead chest like hers.


	5. V

Annabelle Wayne looked at the woods, the blackened arteries of the sky's heart so prominent in the forest, the trees so bare, without their nails, their organs, their hearts, their blood, and Annabelle looked at the small house that Sonic gave her, the largest smallest house in the world, as Sonic wanted to give her everything she wanted, and a house that did not exceed greed and wealth and prosperity was one of her wishes, and to no longer be with her parents. They simply didn't understand her needs, her illness, her reaching arms for love from their chests.

She wondered if something was wrong with her father. She wondered if something was wrong with her mommy (her rotting chest that Annabelle could smell when she cradled her), but Sonic simply never wanted to tell her these things. He said it was all a secret, as he didn't want to divulge in the lives of her parents. The sinful lives they led: her father, a crack and meth drug dealer. Her mother, the town's whore. He thought they had to be led in the path of his blade, the knife that has been handed to him from God, the Divinity Blade, the lightning bolt that breaks apart the skies and separates Heaven from Hell, from Purgatory from Reality, the blade sawed through all the evil inside the sinful's body and split between their insanity and their sanity, their righteousness from their hatefulness, the blade determined if the cut was truly evil, and they said so for Schiza's father, Jack Gerald Mahogany, who committed the rancorous sin of defiling his daughter, the lolita he chose to kill in spirit and mind. The lolita he thought could sing no more, as he grabbed the cherub by its vocal chords and ripped out its wings like the glass wings from flies, turning them into black shiny maggots.

The Divinity Blade took care of him. It made sure he rotted in the prison, buried without a grave, with a funeral without a single mourning lover, without a single dawning star blazing for him, and he was glad that Jack never had a tombstone to mark his name, because he was a forgotten person, a nameless person, who he wished he could never remember.

He hoped Schiza would never remember his name either, but yet his name lingered in her mind. Like fine wine in the alcoholic.

He sharpened the blade as Annabelle went inside her home, looking at all the small knickknacks that were approved for child use, the small plastic telephones, the small kitchen ware that Sonic knew he could only use, the small toilet and the small rooms that had beds for two small children. But Sonic knew that it would only be her, and only her. He would just sleep on the small couch approved for small hedgehogs.

It looked like a rich, elaborate play set, one that the wealthiest would construct for their children. And Annabelle's fingers touched everything as she felt if it was truly play plastic or not. There was even food in the fridge of her favorite meals: spaghetti and macaroni and even in the freezer there was some rocky road ice cream. And she hugged Sonic tightly, her small arms barely covering him, as she told him she wanted to live in here forever, without her parents, without anyone telling her what she could or couldn't do.

There was even a large canvas for Annabelle Wayne to paint her pictures, which Sonic knew she could rest her creativity and imagination there, and not use it in her realistic world that betrayed her so much. To have her creations stampede so many cars, to parade in the streets, to climb the mountains of Kentucky, to swim the rivers and lakes of Michigan, to go back to Minnesota, her original birthplace, not in this ghostly city, not in the ghostly state of Indiana, the state that couldn't see its eyes, its face, its people who lived on its body.

He wished he could move Annabelle out of Indiana and into a more accepting world, such as Vermont, or California, or New York, but she was still so small to make such drastic decisions. Still her arms couldn't reach into the wide sky to hold the sun.

The dawn blazed its blood-rimmed skies. He could see the moon float like an ambivalent hook, the stars like pinholes in the dress of the Goddess. He simply stared at the surrounding areas as Annabelle played with the cookware, made a drum set out of them with nothing but pots and pans and wooden spoons. Sonic thought he could catch the glint of the police's uniforms, the sounds of nearly wild canines barking and sniffing to find the child. But he knew he couldn't let the world have his child. Edward Wayne couldn't have his daughter back. He failed in his duty of being a perfect father, of being a righteous caretaker. Her mother, Cassandra Wayne, she couldn't have her daughter back, because she was ill with mental illness, she was ill with post-traumatic stress, she was ill with contempt for her daughter, as she often screamed at her to put away her whore-couture dresses, her makeup and her pot. And he knew both could never have the privilege, the sanctimony of raising this wonderful girl who God had given him. Had given him the right to raise without these sinister specters hurting her.

He wanted to raise her himself. He wanted to become her father, even if the world thought he was imaginary, a stuffed toy, only a creation from his daughter's imagination.

The Divinity Blade would take care of them, he thought. The Blade always found who was the sacrosanct and the evil, and it always made sure that the sinful and the privileged would be punished.

The girl with the wondrous eyes, with the brown locks of hair that were beginning to turn to a soft hue of silver from her father, from her grandfather who was more of a grandfather than anyone else, he wondered how long the little girl had left before she would make the world bow at its mercy, with the tyrants of her creations, with her mind that would spark many revolutions, create many gods, and her hands, how wondrous they were! How they seemed to be made of stars! Like Sonic's hands, he could imagine she could make wishes come true too, with her slender fingers that could pierce through them, could pull them apart like strings, the stars would be at her mercy, the stars that the gods made that satisfied Zeus in Heaven! Orion would be smashed from her fist, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major would be no longer bears but broken parts of shattered glass, the broken roar shattering the skies! And Sonic couldn't imagine his little girl destroying so many beautiful things, so many things that needed to be savored. She would create so many beauteous things and destroy them, all with the might of her small, fragile, six-year-old heart.

The gods wouldn't like her, he thought. Not one bit.

But he liked her and her destructive power, all the same.

Sonic, the father. Annabelle Wayne, the orphaned child.

The orphaned lamb would cry no longer.

"Sonic, I like it here. I like this house! It's very cute!"

He nodded, listening to the sounds of the hounds, the policemen coming with their guns, their searchlights, trying to take his little daughter away.

"I know you do," he whispered.

The men were marching, in the woods, ready to take her away from him. Take her to a land she couldn't survive in. Edward and Cassandra be damned, he was the lion that got to protect the lamb, and he was going to take care of her, yes.

He could feel his feet becoming talons, his mouth becoming a beak, his eyes turning cinder red, but he tried to keep himself to his original form, to keep Annabelle entertained.

"Sonic, can you cook something? I'm hungry!"

Yes, my dear, my dear sweet child.

I will make all your fears go away.

It wasn't a house by the seaside, but it would do. Uncle Sonic was going to take care of her. No, not Uncle Sonic. Father Sonic. He will never let them take his child away. The lion will roar, the lion will savagely tear them apart, till death will they part.

"Make macaroni!"

Coming right up.

The stove hissed. He put in the water to boil, a milky residue rose as all the macaroni floated to the surface, as he stirred it, as he sang songs of Heroes' past, of the face that launched a thousand ships, of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the monster named Grendel that killed all the men and was killed by Beowulf, of the sonnets sung to the coral-faced mistress with the eyes that were a deep ocean blue, the mermaid women, down in the sea of the Great Barrier Reef.

Annabelle watched him, mesmerized by his voice, by how he stirred the pan, creating a whirlpool that the Greek heroes knew of it as Charybdis, sucking in the water, retching it out, with its many fangled teeth, the teeth that lunched on many men who braved through the seas to get so far, and he sang also of Odin and his ravens, the trickster raven named Yehl, the thousand and one nights he once lived through, being a remnant of a woman's story to prevent her death from a cruel man.

He killed that man too.

His voice brought on many winters, many autumns, many springs, and many summers, it brought on snow, the cascade of leaves, the cascade of the sun's rays, the trees beginning to enflower with leaves and cherry blossoms. His voice brought on revolutions, wars, peaceful times, and death to so many, his voice, it couldn't be contained, as the dawns and the evenings and the moons and the suns rose and fell and lingered and quickened their paces, and at last, he made the macaroni just as plain as she wanted it, just regular noodled blue box macaroni that he knew she always loved but never had enough of when her parents were with her. But he would give the lamb anything she wanted, anything at all, because the lion was a guardian, a servant to the lamb, and whatever the lamb wished, she will receive.

Annabelle was in awe of what happened. His voice commanded so many forces in the universe, so many stars were plucked from the sky, the sun was eaten like a peach, the moon was crunched like a cookie, as if he was a god, a part of the stars in Zeus' sky, and she thought of how this could've possibly happened, her mind at wonder, of all the things that could happen to her at this moment. Just a few days ago she was in a mental hospital, where nothing happened, where she was bored in the linger of the cold air, as the white phantom nurses commanded her to take her meds, to go to sleep with a harness on, to go to group to learn of hideous and rancorous things, to be watched constantly when she was in the white cotton rooms, the rooms that always beckoned her to sleep as the angels would take her away, the turpentine hands of Thorazine and Haldol.

She ate, and Sonic smiled and said that magical things happened to good people. And Annabelle was, in fact, a very special girl.

She crawled on him, as he lifted her in the air, bounced her on his knee in the house that was so small but yet was built with large hands, and she felt so smothered by love, with him hugging her close to his body, hearing his heartbeat jingle inside him, to be kissed with his gentle lips on her cherub nose and cheeks, to be rocked and fallen to a warm sleep by their small, but yet fully functional fireplace, as she listened to the wind ringing by their home, singing her favorite lullaby "Baa Baa Black Sheep". She had a smile on her face as she slept, held by Sonic, and he smiled too, and wondered how things would be different with him as her father. And soon, his eyes were also lulled by the crackle of the flames, the draconian sputtering from the fireplace, and then he fell asleep, while Annabelle Wayne was in his arms.

It was dawn again.

They slept for over 20 hours. Sonic's voice brought on the time quickly, as the sun and moon dropped to the ocean, taking a deep sink to wash themselves of their sins. Sonic gazed at the fragile body of Annabelle Wayne, sleeping on his stomach, with her thumb in her mouth. She was so comforted. His daughter. His precious, wonderful daughter.

He hummed softly as he rocked the chair, as the fire began to spittle over the last morning's sun, and he whispered that soon, she would have to be awake again, because he could feel the trouble in the air, as the snow began to drip to the earth, as the small icicles grew like claws on the small house.

He thought that the claws of the house were soon going to have some blood melting off the tips of its teeth.

The blue men were coming, he thought as he slowly awakened his tired eyes. The blue men were coming, coming to take my daughter away.

He could hear the hounds on his haunches, the men with their whistles and their constable hats. Hide her in the attic like Anne Frank from the Gestapo.

No, the attic was much too small. She wouldn't fit in it.

He could use more of his powers, make a storm that would blow away the blue men, but he thought that maybe they would soon find out that this kidnapping was all done by a god, and the gods would listen in on his terrible deeds, and God would lecture him.

No, he knew he was doing the right thing. He knew keeping the girl away from her godawful parents was the best thing to do.

Sonic lightly took her petite body and laid her down on the bed, as he vigilantly watched the windows, knowing the blue men would come, and if they didn't find them, then they wouldn't be able to take her away, to take his precious daughter away, the one thing that kept him alive for this job, the only thing that made him proud to be a god, the only thing that he got up in the morning to do, as his talons and wings began to plummet from his fur, as his rubied eyes were sparked and enflamed, as he thought about taking his precious daughter away, deeper in the woods, where none of the blue men could find her, where her parents would never see their daughter again.

He carried the Divinity Blade with him, the blade that fell so many evil men in the past, and he touched upon it again, trying to wash the blood off it, but still it remained. It still carried the singe of murder.

He sharpened it, thinking of all the people with their awful, black, hateful hands trying to take her away from him.

The more and more he spent time with Annabelle, he began to think that he loved her. Loved her as if she was his own. He thought he loved Schiza too, and that he never wanted people to violate her, to make her wings rot by her father's molesting touch, but Schiza averred to Sonic that she didn't need him anymore, that she was becoming a big girl who could take care of her own problems, and while he was proud of Schiza for being strong, for being raised the right way by him, he wished she could stay young, just for a little bit longer, to be able to be lifted in his arms, to be drifted to sleep by his lullabies, to play their innocent, gentle games. He remembered one girl he took care of before she also grew old enough to no longer need him, that he played with her since she was a baby, where her parents simply paid no attention to her, off in their own little problems of their jobs and their dramas. He even fed her with a bottle, his heart growing warm at the memory of her looking up to him with her blue eyes, knowing that he was taking care of her, and that he will be okay from now, in his guidance.

He thought he was going to cry, at the thought of the girls growing old enough to protect themselves from the wolves and monsters, and no longer needing him. He wanted to protect them, forever and always. He always wanted to blanket them at night, giving them goodnight kisses on their heads and cheeks, but when Schiza saw Sonic still not letting go of her, she told him that she wished he would leave her alone, that she wasn't a baby anymore.

Such was growing up, he thought.

Maybe forever and always never really meant forever. Maybe it just meant until they were 13.

He loved all of them. But he thought he loved Annabelle the most. And he wished she would never grow up, to have him always protect her.

Six was a young age. He might still have plenty of time to take care of her. But the ages go by so quickly. They never stay young for long.

He continued to toy with the blade, making scraping sounds against the stone, unaware that he was waking his daughter from her loved slumber.

Annabelle soon awoke, hearing the sounds of Sonic once again cleaning his weapon.

She approached him, with her small socked feet that barely made a sound as they hit the carpeted floor, the feet that Sonic loved so much and sometimes teased her he would eat them.

Annabelle, the girl with the hair that was beginning to become metallic, a melting cesspool of so many metals, she wondered why Sonic was so concerned, so worried when they were now hidden in the middle of the forest, that he carried his dagger back and forth, sharpening it, sharpening it, and he told her.

"I have some unfinished business to take care of. There's too many people who want you, sweet Annabelle. And I can't let them have my sweet precious lamb, no, I honestly can't let them pull one single string of hair from your star-studded head."

Annabelle could feel her heartbeat thudding in her chest. She knew something was going on. Nothing was ever hidden from her. She always tried to find the reason for everything.

(Just like Schiza, Sonic thought.)

She thought of Sonic hurting her parents. Although she wanted to be with Sonic, to guide her through her illness that her parents never understood, she wasn't sure why Sonic wanted to…kill them. Her parents have certainly done nothing wrong. They just cared and assumed too much. That wasn't a parental crime. Most often, it was an accident. But Sonic seemed determined to slay her parents, who were the fearful dragons. He wanted to keep them away from his beautiful princess, the girl in the crystal palace, the girl who would have everything in the world given to her. She was his princess to protect, and he was the king. And the king will make sure his princess had all the security in the world. All the peace, all the safety. If he had to kill those dragons for her, he will. If he had to kill those slanderous parents, he will.

"Are you thinking about killing my parents, Sonic? Why?"

His shoulders relaxed. He kept his grip on the hilt of the blade firm, but he thought that lies made the world go round. Especially for his daughter, as all children had to face lies once in a while. Soon he would tell her the difference between a bold-faced lie and a white lie.

Sweet Annabelle could never know the truth. She was too young. Much too young. Six was an age that was still green.

"No. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to have a talk with them, that's all."

He thought his was a white lie.

The blood still remained on the fine curls of the blade, the vines that grew on the silver body. It still had the blood of Jack Mahogany, of the man who was told the story of the thousand and one nights, the cruel King Arthur, the Big Bad Wolf, the Wicked Witch of the West.

He would slay yet more fairy tale monsters for his little darling. His little sweet Annabelle Wayne.

Annabelle tried to forget about the entire issue. He couldn't possibly use his dagger for evil. He was a sweet, kind guardian who would do anything for her. And if she said she didn't want him to kill her parents, then he will let them be.

But that he was so strong, so worried over his sweet little darling girl, that she was worried too, that this relationship was going to end up as a trail of blood.

She tried to forget about it. Tried.

"Sonic, let's go play!"

He kept the blade in his pelt, then got on his green scarf that blew and uncoiled in the wind like a fabric snake, as the little girl led him outside, wearing her white frock coat, fluffy and innocent and angelic, like a little lamb.

The outside was wet with frost, the grass spindly and sharp, looking like crystals as the sun touched and caressed it, as the white frock coat was also on the trees, smiling and waving in the frosty wind. The snow touched the earth like cottony downs of fluff, chilling their feet every time they took a step, Sonic suffering from his decision to not wear boots. He shivered, his fur wet with snow, as the Ice Queen wanted to chill them, down to their fibrous bones.

He could see the dawning sun beginning to sharpen in the sky, and as he held her soft, lambed hands, he smiled, and whispered to her soft, lambed ears, "Try to catch me, if you can."

He gave her a kiss on the nose, and she felt instantly warm at his touch, her heart being soothed from the throes of ice. Her cheeks flushed, and more vaporous breath was puffed out as she laughed, as if she was a draconian child, her breath the hot fires of passion.

Annabelle continued to giggle, as Sonic dashed into the forest, her hands reaching for him, trying to follow his trail of his oxidizing breath in the winter forest's grove. Sonic thought that she sounded like an angel, one with wings that would soon grow to ones as large as his.

Hers were white, and his were black. He often thought who was truly the real angel.

He couldn't be, committing this awful sin of God. Keeping their child away from them.

He listened intently to the sound of the falling snow, whispering to him, "Catch us on your tongue, if you can."

The policemen marched through the winter ice, with the sounds of German shepherds barking with their fangled teeth like Charybdis, ready to devour his child. But he wouldn't let that happen. No. His child was his and his to stay.

He kept the blade firmly hooked into his hands, as he looked in the winter tundra for her family.

No longer would they need their daughter.

She was his now. And he was not going to let anyone take her away from him.

His precious baby. His precious little lamb.

The lion was prepared to eat his meal, to commit sacrilege for his daughter.


	6. VI (edited)

The winter night was silent, as the moon shone like a pale tooth in the sky, shining with the many other stars in the sky, the other teeth in the sky's maw. The officers crunched through the snow, as the dogs continued to bark like savage beasts, their searchlights the new suns and moons in the sky, looking for the young girl that was taken away, embedded in the night like a lone star, a star that shined brighter than any other, the star known as Annabelle Wayne, the constellation known as Sonic.

"He couldn't have gone far," they said.

"The kidnapper couldn't have gone far, he's somewhere in these woods, these dogs can tell."

They made the hound dogs sniff the hospital bed that was abandoned near the forest, smelling the perpetrator, the one who took away Edward and Cassandra's precious daughter, into a cloaked forest full of snow.

They could smell the scent of hedgehog as they advanced in the woods, hearing the sounds of a little girl laughing through the darkness, through the quiet wilderness. The policemen, the men in the blue suits, they knew they were getting closer, closer to finding the girl that they wished would come back to her mother and father, to spend a nice spring and summer and fall with them, until it soon came back to another dreadful winter, back to the memories of the kidnapper having his way with their daughter. Robbing her of her innocence, of his hands blinding her until he took her into the fallen arches of the snow, the knees of the Snow Queen.

The Snow Queen wanted to take all her daughters, all the children, and blind them with snow, choke them with snow, until they were frozen in their insides.

They continued to hear the bubbling laughter, the sounds of a little girl playing, and they wondered what the kidnapper was doing, playing with the girl like this.

Maybe she was picked up by a nice guy, Cassandra has said to them.

They hoped so. They wouldn't want their precious daughter to be decomposing in the winter ground, the body being covered by the Snow Queen's slender pale fingers, her nails the color of garnets, the color of grapefruit wine. Her body completely white and not without the warmth she once had, the flush on her cheeks when she was alive, completely gone and decayed away. The police hated to see that happen to any little girl, any girl that was as kind and as fragile as Annabelle Wayne.

They could hear more laughter as they got further in the long tangled bodies of the trees, their long sharp fingers wishing to scrape away everything the policemen had in their souls. They could sniff the smell of burnt cinder, a house in the distance, one they soon could plainly see was a wealthy kid's playhouse, one made with functioning parts and a carpet and even real small beds and real small couches and chairs. They thought everything inside the home was made with silk, with the rich touch of gold, with the scent of wealth.

They glanced through the diamond-shaped windows and were impressed with how elaborate the design was, how it nearly looked like a real house, one that any child could live in on their own. He wondered who was rich and crafty enough to create so many small, but yet fully working parts for the home, as the steam continued to rise in the chimney, the drifting smoke exuding heat, as the fireplace continued to flare with the roving monsters inside, scraping away at the firewood and the remnants of a something her father wrote to his sweet daughter, smoking and flickering in the flames, melting and blackening.

They even wondered if they could come in and take a look and get warm by the fire, but they knew they had a little girl to look for. But they felt cold, and dearly wished to come inside, as their fingers were nearly chafed, their faces nearly torn with frostbite, the hideous beast that ate the soft pink meat of humans.

They still thought it was peculiar that a house like this was in the middle of the woods, where there were no children at all to play with it, all except for…Annabelle.

Was this the kidnapper's house? Could he possibly have made the little girl live in this home, to get away from her parents? And was he small, an elvish-sized human who could live in the home without worry of hitting his head on the boards, in the small attic that they couldn't pry their fingers in that were cold and gray?

What a strange case, they thought to themselves. The child was living in this house, with a man who was possibly very small. They joked that a hobbit had come to kidnap the girl, except they knew he would live in a burrow near the hills, never coming out at winter and always eating and sleeping in relative luxury.

Even if Bilbo Baggins had taken away the girl, they still had to take the case seriously, as they could hear more frosty laughter in the woods ahead of them, a torrent of wind gusting through the trees, as they shook their spindly hair and made the snow fall like bits of fluff on the ground.

It was strange. Very strange.

They told all the details to Annabelle's mother and father and even they couldn't believe it. They surmised that possibly Annabelle was living in safety, with just a strange short man who just wanted to "borrow" their daughter, but they still couldn't assume so much. He could still be doing things that Cassandra knew too much about that she wished would never happen to her daughter, and she prayed to God that she will be alright, that the short stout man was a nice man who just simply missed having children.

But God never answered. He said He was too busy.

They went further in the woods, hearing the girl giggling, feeling the breeze of the stinging wind hitting their faces. They worried a snow storm was going to hit the woods with a big breath of frost, and they didn't want their child to be cold, frozen in the woods, with the fingers of the Snow Queen capturing her victim. Their sun-flasks blazed through the snow, as the night began to put on an elaborate dress made of golden orbs and stars, with the moon as its lonesome face, and they hoped that the man would at least let the girl back in his home to keep her warm, to keep her company.

The snow blew through their hair, the canine's noses stifling through a hit of ice in their nostrils, they soon found her as they trekked through the woods.

They couldn't believe what they were seeing. It was even more peculiar than a hobbit adopting their daughter.

They soon found the captor of the little girl to be a stuffed blue hedgehog, with his ears and nose and eyes and feet and hands all alive and fully functional, and he stared back at them, his eyes cutting through the trees, through their line of vision.

They inserted bullets into their pistols. They aimed towards him.

A live stuffed animal. His stitches and his fluff and his golden bell heart had come to life, and he wanted to adopt their daughter. Their beautiful, glass heart daughter, with a wondrous heart that rang just as much as his.

He nuzzled Annabelle's cheek as they laughed gaily and she felt so warm by him, his heart heating her up like the fireplace in their small house. He gave her a comforting kiss on her cheek, flushed with the warmth of his fur, and they continued to talk amongst themselves, placing their fingertips on top of each other's hands, feeling their hearts entwine with the winter cold. They didn't feel frozen. They felt warm by their love, their compassion, and he told her that he loved her, and he wished they would never become apart, their hearts ripped from their chests. And she said she wished she was with him, forever and always.

(Just like Schiza had always told me, he thought.)

Did this girl know a little bit about Schiza? His past daughter before she succumbed to the throes of growing up?

He wrapped his hand in the holes of her fingers, his smile radiating in the cold. Glowing opalescent like the moon.

They weren't sure how to approach him. He clearly wasn't harming her, or was he like most typical "kidnappers". He was a stuffed toy, after all, that came to life, and they could see him with their own tightened eyes as the snow continued to freeze them in their sockets. They wondered if they were also catching the schizophrenia disease from the little girl. Or if they entered her elaborate fantasy land that she created. Where her favorite stuffed toy could come to life. Where she could live in a small playhouse. Where the winter couldn't bother her because she had the love of this hedgehog.

They knew that Annabelle had to be returned to her mother and father. They missed her dearly. They loved her, as they have shown them with the pearly beads of their tears. Shining so brightly against the dark silhouetted face of the moon…

"Don't move," they said through the silence of the snow. The falling ice was collecting in Sonic's fur, on his scarf that was blowing so forcefully through the wind.

Sonic gazed up at them, his green eyes looking like a jade knife the Aztecs used to cut up their sacrifices, and they could hear a distant growl, as he kept Annabelle close to his body, and he held up the Divinity Blade, the metal shining a white spark in the moonlit night.

"She's mine. She isn't going anywhere. I'm not bringing her back to her mother, or to her father. They have committed too many sins for her to be brought back to those monsters."

They thought he would take the knife and careen it towards the little girl's neck. They flashed their pistols, ready to fire if he made any other moves.

Their fingers were so close to pulling the trigger. To shoot this stuffed animal until he was nothing more but fluff and bullet holes.

"Drop the weapon, or we'll shoot. Put your hands above your head and get down on the ground."

He smirked, the smile cutting across them like a razor blade.

He put the dagger in his pelt as he lifted Annabelle above his neck, and dashed in the snow, the policemen finding he was going as fast as a speeder they would always ticket to make their pay, until he disappeared into the fragmented moon.

The policemen wondered how he could move so fast, how he could take their daughter away from them in such a fluid movement, and they aimed their guns low, wondering if this hedgehog was the famed videogame character that the children always talked about. They shook their heads, disgruntled on this fantasy they couldn't wake themselves out of, and continued to hold their pistols in their hands, and called backup.

The perpetrator wasn't going to surrender their daughter. Not without a good chase, a good shootout to convince him that Annabelle was Edward's and Cassandra's daughter, and they weren't going to let him take her away from her hard-working, well-deserving parents they've known for so long.

Edward was a good man. He couldn't do anything wrong, especially in the raising of his daughter. And Cassandra was such a level-headed, calm and rational lady who kept both her and her husband tranquil while they followed his footprints in the snow, the hedgehog running so quick that they couldn't even see him in the winter wind, as if he was the wind itself. The trees swayed under his influence, and dropped an avalanche of snow on some of the men and the hounds.

A little bit of snow couldn't stop them. They had their badges to protect them, the duty to protect any innocent children, any innocent civilian, from being hurt and killed, and they wouldn't let their daughter suffer from the same fate as thousands of children every year. Their guns were raised high again, and their fingers were close to pulling the trigger, to ignite the fire to all this ice.

They kept marching, like little toy soldiers.

They knew Annabelle wasn't safe, even in the hands of this monstrous stuffed animal who promised her a world that she could escape into. Children shouldn't fall for their imaginations, especially when it was one of the most deadliest things that could prey on the little girl. It gave kids hope and dreams, and they knew that once they grew up, all of that would be shattered, as they would traverse back into reality. Edward never allowed Annabelle to use her imagination, and they praised him for it, because one couldn't live on their dreams and creations. It was just something that would even break them further in the harsh reality of being an adult.

He wasn't going to give away his daughter. He was going to give her own world to imagine, her own world that she would be safe in, not with these adults who didn't understand, who were too grounded in the fantastic and deadly world of reality.

Annabelle, riding on Sonic's head, stared back at the policemen calling for backup, swarming the forests as if they were an army of ants, with their guns held high and the hounds barking with the saliva stretching in their teeth like the strings of stars that Sonic promised her she could have like a beautiful pearl necklace, and she knew that this was a situation that could mean Sonic's life, her precious father's life who told her she could have anything at all she wanted. The policemen looked as if they weren't afraid to make his chest full of bloody wounds, with lead that would poison his body.

"He's resisting arrest! He's resisting arrest!" The policemen aimed their guns and fired at his chest, his head, but he was so quick, so fleet in his strong long legs and his stamina as they could see he barely exhaled a heated breath through the frost.

They followed his tracks, the nearly triangular footsteps, and the hounds wouldn't stop bounding from the men in the blue suits' leashes. They let them go, their teeth and eyes maddened, their teeth like crescents of moons, their eyes like muddy bloodbaths, as they sniffed the tracks and followed him, leading them back to the small playhouse, Sonic holding onto the little girl tightly, as the snow billowed past his quills, snow drifts collecting on the house.

He thought he couldn't be running too far from the playhouse. More police officers would come and try to surround them, and he couldn't take Annabelle further than this forest, a place that was once uninhabited by nothing but a few snow hares and the lone wandering fox. Next to these woods was a highway, and he feared being noticed by the other humans, as suddenly more of the human race seem to believe in the powers of imagination, his fur and his eyes and his hands clearly visible to everyone. He could sniff the hounds becoming closer, he could hear the policemen with their crunching boots, and their suns and moons were beginning to flash in his eyes, as if it was daylight already. He covered his eyes with his hand, as he tried to find out what else he could do, to keep his daughter safe, to keep his daughter his.

He didn't want to give up Annabelle to these police officers, to her mother and father. Not after what he's done for her. Not after what he was willing to sacrifice for her. He was going to bring the fall of civilizations to her, the defeat of God and Satan to her, he was willing to negotiate with God to keep her forever, to always be his flower that would grow in the sunlight, in the happiest of times, and to bloom without the blood and stench in the darkness of reality, to become a stronger woman. Maybe strong like Schiza. But he couldn't think of her now. Not after when she claimed she didn't need him anymore.

He felt lonely without his daughters. He wished he could have them back, along with Annabelle.

The policemen swarmed him, flashing their lights, swinging their pistols at him. He knew he couldn't think about his damning self-pity any further. It was time to negotiate, or find a plan that would allow him to keep her in his hands, in the folds of his wings. Otherwise he had to fight the policemen, and he didn't want to hurt anyone, to have Annabelle watching everything, the thick spigots of violence. He preferred to keep everything safe, including her.

"Put the weapon down, or we'll shoot."

He paused, a chill invading his body. He wondered if the cold was getting to him, or the policemen who threatened his life.

He wanted Annabelle to warm him, with the golden liquid inside her heart, her alcohol, her wine.

He felt a tug on his hand, the warmth pervading through his body.

Annabelle pulled his arm, and she looked at him with her big, crystal-studded eyes and she looked as if she was beginning to sob, her eyes endowed with tears.

"I…think you should…do what he says, Sonic."

He could catch them. His eyes caught everything.

No, please don't, Annabelle…Please don't…

"Annabelle, are you…crying?"

"I said, put the weapon down, or we'll shoot!"

He shoved off the police, their warnings nothing against the sobbing of a beautiful diamond child.

She nodded, as streams of tears dripped from her cheeks, like a long river on her face.

"Yes Sonic. I don't want to play this game anymore. I want to go back to your house and just sit by the fire. I don't want to be here with all these scary men anymore, where you can…get hurt…"

He held her in his arms as she hugged him tightly, rocking her gently, swaying her body like the trees in the wind. The policemen lowered their guns, as they watched the hedgehog desperately try to make the girl soothed and happy. But she continued to cry. The tears continued to fall like the snow.

"Sonic…I don't want to be here anymore…I don't want to be here…I want you safe too…I want you…I want you…" she mumbled, as Sonic's rocking, his whispering of childhood tales and songs, it wasn't making her happy. She felt scared that the policemen could hurt Sonic, could bring her world to a sudden halt, because her mother and father wanted her back in their home, without realizing that Sonic was a good hedgehog who simply wanted to make her a wondrous being, something her parents could never do, because they didn't have any connections to gods and goddesses whatsoever.

She gazed at the policemen's lights, at the moon that was rising higher in the sky, a white glass hook that was ready to take her away from this morbid reality and into her own world, where she could be with Sonic forever, where they could dance and play and sing for eons, and she could forever remain a six year old girl, and Sonic could always remain a live hedgehog who was willing to bring upon her the world, and he could even bring upon God's face to her, and tell her that everything was going to be okay, because there was no god in their lives anymore that could control them and demand them of petulant things, and they could live freely, without the worry of the Ten Commandments and his booming words.

Sonic held her, as the men in the blue suits continued to watch him, as he held the weapon that was shining in the moon's face, and he thought the only thing he could do now was surrender her, to give them back their daughter. Theirs. Not his, like he hoped and dreamed of.

"I'm sorry to bring her in this mess."

He balled up his fists. Annabelle thought he could catch some hints of tears. Her eyes could catch everything too. Sonic didn't realize that.

"Annabelle, go back to your parents…I don't know what the policemen will do to me, but I have to tell them I've done nothing wrong and I tried to keep you safe from all the dangers and poisons this world has…"

He let her go, coaxing her to go to the men, their wandering and criticizing eyes looking down on the hedgehog.

He was beginning to believe he committed a great crime, one that God never wanted him to do.

He committed theft. Theft of the heart.

"Go Annabelle, go back to your mom, your real father. I'll just suffer the consequences of my sins I just performed."

Sonic let go of her hand, but she tried to make them stick as if they were together by some divine force, and she remained near Sonic, not taking a step further to the police officers, the scary men who threatened her creation, her father who she knew was truly her father.

"No! I'm not going to leave you, Sonic! I just want to go home! My real home! I don't want to go anywhere else except with you! I'm going to make a mountain Sonic, a mountain so tall that no one can bother us, ever again!"

She held onto Sonic tighter, her face even redder than before. Sonic knew he couldn't keep her as his daughter, but he could tell Annabelle had other plans, that her mind was suddenly radiating, that she was beginning to use her powerful imagination.

No, she couldn't be thinking of that.

The force that could bring down a thousand gods.

She was going to tell God that she will keep Sonic as her own guardian, her wishgiver, her father.

"I can't give you up Sonic! I want to be with you forever! I'm not letting these scary men take you away! I'm not letting anyone take you away! I…I…I…"

She shut her eyes, her hair flowing in the bitter wind, as Sonic could feel a rumble in the earth.

She was creating a brand new dynasty, a new life flowing in this forest, a mountain beginning to bloom like a flower among the winter tundra, in the glinting moonlight.

The policemen sat back at awe at the hill that was beginning to develop, a rolling blue top that reminded them of the mountains in Kentucky. They thought as the hill continued to grow, continued to tower over them, the blue mountain beginning to have long needles growing at the sides, the snow beginning to amass at the top and their little playhouse, they thought the mountain had stabbed the air, like a very tall, very blue knife that made the night sky bleed.

The mountain made Mt. Everest small in comparison, and not as frightening, as the mountain had gargoyles guarding her and her father's house at each feet, and the long needles threatened to stab anyone who climbed it, as they poked through to even the policemen wearing Kevlar, and they could see a long thin river flowing from the sides and into the earth below them, a river that streamed on a mountain.

Annabelle could no longer see the policemen, but the stars surrounding them, the sharp spindly hands welcoming them to their realm, glowing like the blood that was spilling in the night, the white moon the long thin nail that tried to cover it all. But she imagined the mountain would continue stabbing it, to show her frustration, her pain at being separated from her real father, Sonic, the only one she felt who truly understood her, who truly cared, not Edward, the father she no longer wanted to call her father anymore, but his real name.

She looked at how high they were, how cold it was in the top of the mountain, as the snow fell on them. The wind blew harshly, Sonic's scarf quivering, Annabelle's long thin strings of nearly mercury hair blowing from her head and into the bloody moonfelled world they were now a part of, a part of God's galaxy.

Sonic found the Divinity Blade, covered by snow as he picked it up gently, and he could still the traces of blood on its mantel, the blood of so many creatures that the children were afraid of, fell by his courage and his determination to make the world such a safe and protected place for his daughters.

And this mountain, none of the monsters, the nightmares, the men in the blue suits, no one could get them here. Not even Annabelle's fake mother and father, not even they could steal her away from his arms. She would remain safe on the highest mountain, near the stratosphere of the Earth, and near his heart, the highest heart in the world, the one that would ring like church bells for all the world.

He felt now that he was the king, the god of Annabelle's world, and he felt that this was perfect, with both his wishmaking prowess and Annabelle's imagination, they could make the world a safe place for her, a place where imagination could reign, where every child had a diamond-studded crown made from the stars that he could pick apart in this space, and everyone could answer to both King Sonic and Princess Annabelle, the wondrous masters of their world. Nothing could ever stop them, not now, when they were so high in the world, when his wings were no longer torn but as proud and brilliantly dark as they were, the trickster raven god who was now the main god of Earth!

Annabelle covered herself with her hands, shivering. She went inside the small home, ready to sit and melt at the fireplace, her cold fingers that would soon have color again, her face recovering their flushed appearance, like the fairy she was, with the magnificent glass wings that he always knew she always had, the tips of them covered in embroideries, the bodies of the wings covered in a rich luscious gold, his angel, his child.

As the night grew darker, bled more with the silver light of the mountain's blade, he could feel that he was beginning to transform, into his monstrous form that he knew his child couldn't stare at, the raven that he hid from his daughter, his long thin arms becoming endowed with long black tendrils of feathers that were nearly liquid as they flowed and softened to soft material, that were nearly dark blue in the moon's light, his muzzle a long thin yellowed beak that hardened as he continued to stare at the opalescent moon, his eyes becoming red and dark like the blood that he could sense would flow at the sacrifice of having his daughter's world come to life, his feet were now long talons that looked like metal with the thin droplets of blood that spilled from all the monsters he killed, and he knew there would only be much more blood ready to collect, a spray that would make his crow feet a dark, metallic red.

His feathers collected the warm air available in the cold, wounded night, and he flapped his wings, gliding in the snowflake dusted air, looking below for anyone who dared to climb his mountain, the mountain that so rightly belonged to his sweet princess, his queen, Annabelle Wayne.


	7. VII

"Your daughter has been taken by her stuffed animal, and she's now on a mountain, higher than Everest, living in a small playhouse. She wouldn't come to us willingly. There seems to be a relationship between her and the stuffed toy that they've built, a loving, fatherly relationship, and he has her convinced that she doesn't want to see her birth father. That all sounds ridiculous, we know Ed, but it really has happened. You have to believe us."

He thought the police officers were just as insane as his daughter, spreading all these lies of what they saw. He wondered if they've been smoking some of the pot they found in his wife's room, or been taking another criminal's LSD. But as he sat, with his disheveled hair, disheveled eyes over the loss of his daughter, he wished he didn't had to believe in the police's story. That his daughter was chosen by a god, and he would have to fight it, maim it, even kill the god, make its sharp parts scattered in the universe, to no longer become a constellation. He would smash him apart with his fists if he had to, just to have his daughter back. Even with his mighty wings he couldn't fly her away to heaven, because he would be holding onto those wings and crushing every hollowed out bone inside them.

He didn't want to believe them. He knew they were liars, as most police officers had to lie and exaggerate about crimes just to send someone to jail. He thought the policemen would even put him in jail for speeding once upon a time, before they knew him as "Edward Wayne, the busy family man who took care of everything and kept everything in his home clean from all the rusty needles from the meth users, the razors from the cocaine eaters". If he even told them that they were liars, they would send him to jail, possibly never meeting his daughter again.

Police officers were crooked, and they often kept a lot of his drug users in jail for simply having paraphernalia. And he would lose his precious money, his money he needed to keep his mansion paid for, his daughter fed, his wife having her pot and her whorish dresses, her hospital bills paid for after being trapped for two years, lost inside its black embroidered gates and its sliding door mouth, with its teal eyelashes with the bars to close out the sun.

Why couldn't they just tell him the truth? That they had his daughter all along, not with some stuffed animal on top of the tallest mountain in the world and in a play set house that could only be inhabited by hobbits and children?

"Ed, are you listening to us? We said we can't get your daughter. She's up too high. This is a FBI investigation now. They're going to get a helicopter and try to rescue her. They have weapons to bring this…thing down, to keep him away from your daughter. We'll get her, don't worry."

His hands shook. He knew it wasn't from the cold, but from the anxiety, the anger he felt that they were taking this seriously, to rescue his daughter from a teddy bear…he shook the table as he laid them broadly, his nearly white, wrinkled hands so flat to the policemen, wondering how he could have wrinkles at the age of 28, as he said, "No. I'll see what's going on myself and get my daughter back. Even if it has to take me to climb this supposed mountain. I don't want to scare my child. Think of how scared she is that she's kidnapped by a stuffed animal for Christ's sake, even if your ridiculous, outlandish story is true. I'm going to get her myself, even if I die on that mountain, even if that fucking blue teddy bear kills me. I'm saving my daughter. I'll be the damn hero of this case. I don't believe any of you, and I think I'd rather have a competent police force rescuing my daughter than you clowns."

Cassandra made her great, big youthish and candy-sateened nailed hand on his back, trying to quell him of his anger, but he began to shout, his fists punching the invisible men around him, as he slammed the door, shaking everything in the police officer's investigation room, as he shouted, "Good day to you fools! Every day is a good day to be a fool!"

"Calm down, Ed. There's…no reason to act like this…"

She looked into his eyes, and she could see that his face was warm, broiled with sweat, and he was gripping onto the steering wheel as if it was the last thing he would hold onto before he died, and she could tell that under that boiling face he desperately wanted to scream, to cry for his daughter, to exact revenge on the police force and this man who kidnapped their daughter. He couldn't believe in their story that a stuffed animal had taken her and placed her on the highest mountain, but as he turned on the radio and drove through the empty, hollow streets with golden lanterns lighting their way, he heard a breaking news report statically speaking through the radio, as the woman described the mountain that appeared, and of the little girl who was taken away to the universe by an innocuous god.

"I'm here in the woods by Old U.S. Highway, looking at what appears to be a very tall, and very dangerous mountain that suddenly grew just last night. Police have revealed details that a young six-year-old girl, named Annabelle Wayne, is on top of the mountain, with a house that appears to be…a child's play set home, with a live stuffed animal that appears to be the popular video game character, Sonic the Hedgehog?"

It was a great day to be a fool today, he thought. Such a great, glorious day to take the LSD and the Ecstasy. He wished that he got everyone on those drugs. He would be an even richer man.

"Annabelle Wayne is the daughter to 28-year-old Edward Wayne, with his wife, 27-year-old Cassandra Wayne. Police couldn't reveal too many details, as they knew little about the kidnapper's intentions and if we aren't all just imagining everything…" A laugh, and he could visualize a smile, her perfectly white set of pearly teeth. Fuck her.

"Police have ordered back up, and are planning on getting the FBI on the case, doing everything they can to rescue Edward and Cassandra's daughter from this imminent danger. We will report more on this story as it happens."

He turned the radio off, his face covered in thick, damp coats of sweat.

"I need a Camel. Bad. Bring me one, Cassie."

Cassie didn't hesitate. She knew when he needed a cigarette, he had to have it now. He took the long white stick and breathed in fully into his body, his bloodstream, and he breathed out a hazy mist from his mouth, his forehead continuing to be drenched, a headache beginning to pound inside his sinews of his head.

"Annabelle really has been kidnapped, by a stuffed animal, a blue hedgehog of all things. And the FBI is involved in this case. I don't know how the hell how that mountain appeared or how this stuffed animal even became alive, but…I feel like I'm the only one who can talk to him, Cassie. That I know my daughter better than anyone, and I can convince him to bring her back to me. But how can my own daughter, believe that this toy can bring her so much of the world, more than her own father? Doesn't make sense. I…I…"

He paused, his wrinkled hands evident in the bright yellow sodium light, as the cigarette nearly fell from his lips as he let it loosely hang, trying to let the cancer stick comfort him from his own worries. His own daughter, being taken away. A toy that could threaten her life at any time. Living on a tall mountain. Living in a play set house…

It all seemed like this was all a fairytale, a children's story. He wondered if anything in this reality was true. They would suddenly enter a completely different world, entrapped by his daughter's mind, Annabelle. Her psychosis able to be viewed in their own eyes…Her magical sickened view encased in the webs of her brain, in the deterioration of the schizophrenia.

"I need to get Annabelle back. Whatever it takes. Even if it takes me climbing that whole mountain, to fight a fucking blue teddy bear, to…somehow bring my daughter back down again. From her own little world. And I have to bring her back to reality. Only her own father could do this. Her own, flesh and blood father."

The lights radiated their path, Cassandra believing those glowing orbs looking the same as festering wounds. The wounds that were festering in her body, that were cold and black, those scars from the ancient past. How they bled under her nails, under her tears, as she thought of the man who robbed her of her innocence. Her delicacy was her virginity, said her father. May he burn in Hell forever, and she wished him dead, even if he was still alive out there, having a happier life than her.

She couldn't think of that about her father. She couldn't think of her own little daughter, in danger, in a world that she couldn't understand even if she created it. Her mind was gray, rotted, seeping of the same worms and the same decay and the same flies that she knew, all along, and she wanted to get all the flies out of her daughter's brain, all the maggots, as they tore into her precious innocent mind, her fetus-borne head.

Edward mentioned to her before that his mother, a mother whose face he never saw except when he was a baby but could hardly remember her features, she was a schizophrenic, living the same kind of life that Annabelle had lived, in the Minnesota State Hospital. He had the choice to see his mother, possibly living in her own world just like Annabelle's, but he chose not to. He knew his mother was in such a pitiable condition. She lived in white cotton rooms all the time, in a white baby blue cotton robe, her body weak and stick-thin as she could barely eat anything without fear of toxins and poisons, and she wore clothes that made her seem like a haggard old lady, her hair like the medusa's, her slithering like the snake she was.

She wondered if Annabelle had thought of her like that before. Smoking her pot, seeming like she had a scaly body instead of legs. She seemed to only live for the thrill of sex, the thrill of getting high, more than she had ever cared for her daughter. She wanted her daughter back in her arms, as her own scaly, clawed hands that were reeking with acid, and she wished she couldn't corrode her with her vileness, as her insides was nothing but a large stomach, that continued to devour her victims whole and alive, like her father had done with her, God damn him.

Have her back. Have her back. It was the only thing in her mind.

Climbing mountains. What hasn't she done before? She could devour mountains with her long mouth that she could detach, even belch mountains, puke mountains, and she knew her husband could do the same, because he was strong, a reliable man, someone who dearly loved his daughter so. He could climb a mountain for his precious darling. He would do anything, even be involved in the drug trade to pay for her hospital bills, even kill this supposed teddy bear to get his daughter back.

His daughter, his daughter. His sweet little Annabelle Wayne.

What he wouldn't do without her. What he couldn't do without her.

They were going to happen. He was going to do everything he couldn't and wouldn't do. He would commit the greatest sins, the greatest felonies, and if God struck him down, so be it, it was all for his daughter. His perfect, angel, fragile-hearted daughter.

He inserted the bullets into the pistol, and told himself that he was going to climb that mountain. For her. For his wife. For both of them.

He extinguished the flame from his cigarette, as he stepped on the gas pedal, and he said, "We're going to get her back. No matter what."

The pistol continued to gleam in the pus-filled light.

Cassandra wondered if someone was going to die tonight. And she uttered a prayer, but God didn't hear her.

—

He bought everything he needed. He had all the mountain gear to climb this vicarious mountain, the one with his daughter, the princess of the world, the princess of the stratosphere, and her king, the Mountain King, the Lich King, who wanted to bring the world to an end to all those who defied his daughter's wishes, and the wishgiver had to do everything to make his wishes come true. He could even kill the people she loved if she said so, or to make his wishes be granted.

He smoked yet another Camel in the arctic weather, as he analyzed, slowly, how he would climb this mountain.

The father was so determined. He had his pistol in his pelt as he continued to smoke his cigarette, climbing the mountain that threatened to keep him away from his daughter. The thought of death never crossed his mind.

Cassandra thought of it all the time as she watched him climb the mountain, climbing so high already, a father who was drenched with adrenaline, with the capacity to withstand the weather that would freeze even his fiery heart, and Cassandra continued to pray to God, hoping He would listen, but she heard no reply at all, no tumultuous voice, no golden eyes, no silver ones, no bone-pricked fingers.

She wondered if there was any God at all to listen to her, to make sure her husband, her wonderful, reliable husband, would be okay.

He sharpened the blade, prepared to hear the crunching of her father's boots on the snow, the snowstorm that whistled outside, the sun that refused to show its face of the perpetual battle that was arriving, the marching men ready to fire their trumpets, fire their pistols, ready to sing into the heaven's light that this child had created, because heaven was the only thing worth living to her, as her parents taught her. Nothing else at all mattered to sweet little Annablle Wayne. She heard there was a heaven when people died. But as she listened to the squawks and screeches of Sonic's raven form about to arise in the winter storm, as the sun could barely teeth through the clouds with its bright ray of light, as the snow continued to surround his wings like polished crystals, as his eyes glowed like a bloody Mary river, he carried the dagger in his talons and he roared, "It's time to die, sweet little Edward Wayne! Annabelle has wished for you to be dead. Look as the soulfulness in her eyes had waned away, as her creations are being birthed, as the stars and moon are being taken away by God…I have nothing left to lose except Annabelle. Annabelle, my sweet precious Annabelle…"

His face transmogrified to Sonic's innocent-adoring face, his cuddly muzzle, his felt ears, and his eyes that could cut another's eyes by staring at them.

He remembered his daughter and the time she spent in the hospital, all those years locked up in that asylum! Her powers had to be kept under control, like a giant beast sleeping in the blackest pit of the ocean. But since she met him, her powers were being used, her beautiful, wondrous powers of creativity! He opened Pandora's Box, he disobeyed the rules and the watchful eyes of God, but the moon and sun were no longer watching with their yellowed eyes, holding him with their jaundiced fingers. He knew he was free and he could take Annabelle to anywhere he pleased, he could use the powers for good, to create a world where children no longer had to suffer, where the evil were mercilessly bloodied and punished, while the good were in their own version of heaven. He was going to create both a heaven and a hell on Earth, to no longer demand people to be good now or later to get in the afterlife. He was going to make it become real, as real as he was, from his felt heart to a real heart with veins and arteries. They would simply be good or evil once they were adults. Only the kind and loving adults would be allowed in Heaven, and the ones like Edward and Cassandra, with their multiple sins and felonies, they would be sent to a fathomless hell at the center of the Earth.

Children would be rulers. They would be gods. Like Pan, playing his magical lute and growing all the worlds' plants and grass and flowers, all the worlds' beauties. He thought the children only knew about the truths and realities of the world, the simple and just truths, while all the darkness would fade away into light.

It was perfect. All of it. He would begin the birth of the new world, the world that belongs to mystic children gods and goddesses like Pan, by the death, the slaying with his Divinity Blade, of Annabelle's father.

"Sonic?"

He saw her by the golden gemulate light by the lantern by their house, of Annabelle Wayne, her silver hair drifting in the wind, as the snow continued to pile at the top of the Godless mountain.

She approached him, holding a cherry turnover.

"Are you going somewhere, Sonic? I hope you're not doing anything bad! The police are out to get us again you know…"

"Yes, I know that."

Silence. He simply stared out into the horizon, the gray mist continuing to devour the entire land, like a snake detaching its jaw.

Annabelle could feel the turnover already cooling in the harsh wind. She thought she might as well give it to him now, before it became frosty cold.

"Here's something warm for you to eat, Sonic. I don't want you to be really cold while you're flying to somewheres. You better eat it now."

He smiled warmly, as his cheeks were a flushed pink. She gave him a tight hug, feeling all the warm air in his feathers brimming inside, and Sonic wondered how she wasn't questioning his raven form, or where he was going. To Annabelle, she didn't mind it at all, and always knew that Sonic loved her.

"Forever and always?"

She read his mind.

"Forever and always."

The wind blew, the snow gathering on the small playhouse. She wondered if too much snow would make the playhouse sink, or break. But Sonic's magic would never allow that.

He flapped his wings, as the wind continued to prickle with ice and snow, and he dived down deep into the bottom of the mountain, his knife shining in the last remnants of the sun as it drifted away from the sky.

This would be his final sacrifice to his daughter, his wonderful daughter Annabelle, hallelujah to the new goddess with her angel wings reaching so high unto heaven, over the world, the wonderful, effervescent world that he would soon rebuild from the ground up. He would become the real builder, the real God, the king to his wonderful goddess.

The flesh of a dead adult man had to be raised high in the temple of Annabelle, lest he be judged.


	8. VIII

The winter's touch left her white and shrouded, cold and intoxicated with the kiss of the Snow Queen. Her eyes were frozen shut, her hair flung to the side as the wind continued to caress it, her lips were like lilies, her eyelashes dusted off with that same material her husband uses to make his drugs, the crystals, the crystals of a thousand toxins. Her fingers were icicles, Dalmatianized with the dirt and oil that collected from not washing her hands for weeks, the ritual always worrying her, as she thought of the rotten insides her body always was, the bugs and dead meats and the black liquids that were crawling inside. The snow continued to kiss her with its crystallized hands, and as she waited for her husband, her hands shook, frozen with regret at letting her daughter be free in this world, the ice collecting in her crevices of her hand, the ridges that were stabbed with pain every time she moved. She hated the ice. She hated the snow. She always hated winter.

But yet she was here, trying to find her daughter in this frozen landscape, her daughter that had a small voice, that her father had always spoken for her. But that was why she was in the psychiatric hospital, to help her rebuild her voice, her mousy voice, her kitten voice, and to rebuild her heart, the one that was solid crystal, not of the fibrous red meat that she had always known, and she always acknowledged her daughter to have that crystal heart, the one fragile heart, and able to glow in so many colors when distributed towards the light, the light of one's smiles and laughters, but she knew that this creature, this so-called Sonic, he would just break it. He would clasp in his gloved hands and make it plummet to the floor. And it would break into many pieces. The once glowing, once crystal-shaded heart, it was nothing now, it had become a razorbladed mess.

Her husband's heart, the heart of many blades, of many spades, he climbed the mountain, the snow dusting off in his face, his eyes stinging with the mountain's pride, its length, its claim to devour the other mountains entirely in its snow-capped gullet, he climbed even when his eyes were in tears, both because of the mountain's terror, and because he was missing his daughter, and in anger because of Sonic, this stuffed animal that had taken her away from him. His daughter, his light, his crystal-shaded flower, the crystal-shaded lily, her aura gave off a brilliant radiance, her smile, her eyes, she was everything to him, and this stuffed animal had grown wings and taken her away. His black, onyx-hide feathers that spread hatred and vileness to anyone, even to him, as he could see him becoming another creature entirely, a monster who wanted to take everything away from good parents, mommies and daddies who cared, and made their children become automations, machines that repeated everything this monster said, with their clawed hands, their teeth becoming electric lights. He didn't want his daughter to be that way. Her eyes were already growing red enough with the nightmare visions she got in her dreams, in her visions of a world gone mad.

She had created everything her mind desired. To be left out of this world, except on a very tall, very precipitous mountain, her eyes always casted off in the worlds of the stars, the fragile crystals of the universe always shining bright for her. They had wondrous things to show her they said. We have wondrous things to show you if you never met another man alive, if your hands become tall as the mountain, with claws that raked the ceiling of your small, fragile house. She had an odd smile, one that curved like a snake. Her dress was no longer accustomed to the weather, but left her knees shaking, doused in snow. The warmth of Sonic couldn't let her survive for this long, not on this Hell. Not on the Hell that was as freezing, as tumultuous as this, as fickle as the sun that sometimes shined and sometimes never wanted to look beyond the Earth's eyes again. The sun would look away, never in the face of her father, the man who loved her, and still loved her.

He raised himself up. The ice continued to thicken under his feet. It became more cold as he hoisted himself up higher, as the wind continued to whip around his cheeks, tear his eyes, and slap his body. The wicked hand of weather, how it always won against the humans! It was like his father, his old, sagely father, the wrinkles collecting and coining his eyes at 36, the fingers become shriveled and decayed, the veins beginning to burst under his tight shallow skin. His father may had no teeth at 36. His hair was already turning gray. He thought he was beginning to grow bald. The hair continued to shed like petals, falling every winter, every spring, every summer, every autumn, every day of his life. He believed he would be completely bald at 30. He could imagine his sweet little daughter having the gene. Her hair as silver as one of Van Gogh's trees. He hated that mostly his family's genes were evident in his daughter. His mother's schizophrenia. His father's senility. She was becoming more of him than he realized. And he thought that maybe, it was a terrible thing, because if creatures like Sonic thought of him as evil, then the rest of the world could view him as evil. As this Sonic creature was a god above all else.

He clenched his teeth through the frost. He could still feel the freezing air collect in his breath. He could feel it touch and solidify his hands and feet. He could feel the whole world breathing on him, making him sure he could never have his daughter back again, taken away by the long wings of the god of the Sun and the Moon, and he wished he could take away the stars, he wished he could take everything he gained away from him, so he would know how it would feel to have everything gone.

He would take his world away from him. All gods had was the world. And his world was his daughter.

He tried to gaze past the snow, the misty fog that shrouded the top of the mountain. He could see a black caricature falling faster, deeper into the thick fog's maw.

He tried to climb higher, but he couldn't help staring at this bird, this creature from the shadows that was gliding through the air, its wings cutting through the glassy sky, the beak like a thin syringe, the eyes as red and as automatic as his daughter's…

He thought that nothing could stop him from taking away the one light in this god's light, its world, its only bright winter solace from the cold, the freezing of his eyes and nose and his pinpricked neck with the sleight of the wind's hand.

The black figure was coming further, the bird plunging down with the needle ready to go inside his body, ready to drain him of his fluids, his blood, his plasma, everything he had always contained in his heart to protect his daughter.

He could imagine her sitting by the top of the mountain, afraid and alone, the fireplace out of wood, her body shivering, her hands barely covering her for warmth, fearful of what this stuffed animal had in store for her, its knife ready to blade through her neck, a cascade of violet blood on the innocent playhouse.

The black silhouette was leaning closer, ready to tear out his frozen eyes, suffocate his frozen throat.

He thought it had claws that glimmered with the shade of blood. Violet. Its wings dark blue and black, the colors of beatings.

The beatings his father gave him that he would never give to his sweet Annabelle.

If only his last name wasn't Wayne, that his father could trace him, find him and his family, and criticize everything he had ever built, and find out about his drug dealing, and arrest him swiftly, as swiftly as the figure began to flap its iridescent wings towards him, its needle-thin beak plunging into his heart, the blade pummeling and searing through his chest, feeling the holy fire that had burned inside it when it killed Schiza's father, when it killed so many monsters and lunatics before him.

Blood began to spill on the mountain, crawling down like little insects, bloody little beetles that scampered across the mountain floor…

He wanted to ask why, why this god was torturing him so, why the blade was going in deeper inside his shallow, frail body, his wrinkled hands barely able to reach for the pistol, the god continuing to say he was damned and his daughter was his, and his forever more, and she would stay young, she would always be this fragile innocent girl with the glass heart, and not have it tainted with the world of adulthood, the growing up that always scarred the minds of those who had such nice minds, minds that would assist in the world, the imagination and the frailty and the innocence of children.

"You're not getting her," Sonic said. "She's mine, and you're nothing but a pathetic excuse of a father, a rotten father who will abuse her, who will hurt her, and I won't let anyone touch a single hair on my daughter, the daughter that you can't be simply too privileged to have. I won't let you take her away from me. I am her father now, and you can't kill me, because my blood are constellations, stars, my eyes see everything, and my wings are made of steel and concrete, but yet can still fly!"

His grip on the mountain was beginning to loosen. The pain was too much to bear. He could feel his heart burning as he imagined him pulling it, plucking it like a raven would, and devouring it like the vulture he was.

He could grab the pistol, but it barely held on. His finger was shaking. He could imagine himself pulling the trigger, and letting this god have hot metal sear through his star and constellation flesh.

"You can't have her," he whispered. "I've known her for six years. I saw her when she was being born from my wife. I've been with her through her very hard times, her very good times, I've been with her for so long, and you barely know a thing about her. The only one who knows more about my daughter is God, and even he doesn't…" The knife was being twisted. He gave out a guttural scream, then continued. "…Claim her as His daughter. And you shouldn't do the same. You're ruining the balance of our family…you're ruining…everything there was about my family."

He thought he could hear the sound of the sirens singing in the mountains, the chimes of children's toys in his ears. They were ringing in the air, the sound of children's laughter, the sound of love in Sonic's heart that he imagined was so wretched and cold and black as his wife's organs.

_He isn't loving. He's killing me. He's killing me right now._

_How can my daughter be with this damnable beast?_

He held his gun, fastened into his hands, and it shook vigorously, the bullet ready to be fired into his heart, the heart he claimed had so much love for his daughter, the one he would protect from him.

_Cold. Frozen. Just like winter. Just like his damnable barely beating heart!_

"And what about your family that was so balanced? You're a drug dealer, trying to pay her bills. You're a man who is ripe to beat her. Your wife, I can tell she is a prostitute, her body rotting under all that weight of her heavy and forlorn heart. And she cares about sex all the time, and her weed that I can smell reeking from her body, from her teeth that is supposed to shine so bright for her daughter. Her mouth is vile to kiss my princess. Yours is too, she will never see you again as long as I live in this world, as long as I continue to be her king, her lovely doting father, the one she never had."

The knife went in deeper. He flinched, but continued to hold onto the gun as if his fingers were steel and wire.

"Tell her I'm sorry then, Sonic. Tell her I'm sorry for trying my best."

He could hear a click. His ears pricked.

And he could feel the bullet tearing through his chest, his chest that once was fluff, but now were full of arteries and veins and blood beetles.

His wings no longer flapped, the wings full of steel and concrete, and the father, his fingers that were steel and wire, they could no longer latch onto the mountain, and both of the fathers, the god and the real, they fell from the several hundred feet, and Ed now knew there was nothing he could do to save his daughter, there was nothing he could do to tell her to repress the feelings of this stuffed animal monster telling her that he was her real father, giving her a choice between the godless and the stars, and he fell to his death, his body broken like a china doll, his blood seeping on the white clouds of the ground, while Sonic, the one who bled stars, he lied with him, his wings arched and trying to fly again like a wet butterfly's wing, and he felt as dead as her father. As dead as Ed.

But he was alive. Just barely. His mouth foamed of blood, as he could feel the needles of his bones thrust in his throat.

Her mother failed to realize Annabelle's father was dead, with the knife firmly razored in his chest. She continued to listen to the rustling of her body, the organs that continued to seep of red virus fluids, the beetles continuing to crawl inside her, the maggots eating her rotting heart, her stomach, her liver and lungs. She couldn't see the big raven that was perched in the snow, the blood continuing to soak the snow, Ed no longer breathing and his fingers like a withered birch tree.

Annabelle listened to the whistling wind for several hours. She couldn't hear anything from Sonic, from Edward, but she could hear a distant helicopter, the police reports on the radio that Sonic left on the plastic kitchen counter, continuing to clamor how an innocent girl was stuck on the mountain, how they found a dead body and an injured hedgehog, while her mother was in shock, denying what happened and what happened in front of her frozen icicle eyes, and Annabelle only hoped that Sonic would fly back, because they had so many fun things to do, so many games they could play, so many cups of hot cocoa to drink.

And she wished he was back, unharmed, and they could go back to their own little world, playing their childish games and having their view that the world was too scary to inhabit, so they gazed up at the stars and wished that they lived among them.

Stars were fragile too. They were made of glass and paper and porcelain. Sonic thought as he suddenly was in that warm home, covered with a blanket and his feet in tepid water, that it would only be so long before he would have to break and shatter every star in that sky, to make room for an even brighter, even better universe, and Sonic thought with this little girl who could wish everything, defeat everything, heal everything, and create everything, that he could become a brand new god, able to protect those who were right and punish those who were wrong, unlike the real God, who only rewarded those who were evil and unjust.

He carried the bloody blade with him as he stepped in the kitchen, trying to clean it in the sink, only a partial amount of the blood being washed away in the mountain stream.

Her father was taken away in an ambulance, his body covered in a white ghostly shawl, while her mother continued to smoke the cigarette, even when it was beginning to singe her fingers.

"Edward, are you there?" she asked. "God wanted to talk to you. He said you never were a bad father. He said he will help you in this fight. We will get her back. We will. We will."

The police escorted her, her eyes continuing to never blink, never ceasing staring at the blood that once soaked the snow, the black feathers that were left blowing in the wind, caught in the police car's window.

She thought she no longer needed the warm cup of milk the police gave her, but a beer. And a lot of weed to help soothe her nerves. And maybe some sex, to remind her of how dead she was inside.


	9. IX

Their feet felt frozen, as they ran across the snow sheets, the blankets of the earth, and their hands were tight, the warm blood connecting to their bodies and tissues and their brains and hearts, and Annabelle Wayne wanted to hold onto Sonic, never letting him go, as the snow continued to pile on their bare bodies, the coats never being able to protect them, the scarves being blown away to the golden orb of the moon.

She wondered if her father was still alive, the man that Sonic continued to tell her was no good, a thieving drug lord that placed money above his daughter's safety. His eyes didn't look like liars' eyes when she gazed at them, the jade knife beginning to cut further in her mind, as he weaved a new tale about her parents, the stars shining so bright, so sharp and so like broken shards of glass. She thought if she even glanced at any of these lies with her mind her wrists would begin seeping. The frost and the snow continued to make her shiver, her teeth clamoring and crashing against each other like the ocean waves against a shore, her tongue the pink sea full of sodium. She thought she couldn't breathe with all the running they had to do.

The snow continued to be clasped in her silver silky hair, while Sonic had a face of contempt, a morbid curiosity of how this whole event, how he murdered her father outright and was reaching into the next city, the city of Fort Wayne, where he thought he could hide away until the snow buried them all, and the death of her father was a case that would never be touched upon again. It was divinity that struck him. The gods ordered him to die. His eulogy was written by Apollo, and he was casted off to the broken stars by Zeus. Reminding of how to never treat a daughter, a wonderful girl who deserved so much more. So much more than a mother who had a long, steeping delusion. Than a father who was money hungry and tried everything to pay for his daughter's hospital bills, seeing them as an annoyance than a necessity.

The girl, she was sick! He knew that. He knew that more than anything. Schizophrenia was a disease as hated as the plague, which always survived throughout the many generations as the world continued to spin against the sun's bare breasts, and Sonic wished that Annabelle could wish her illness away, but God said that he couldn't absolve anyone of their illness. But Annabelle thought of it nothing more but a slight anomaly, just a small cut or scratch on her body. There were bigger wounds to heal. She wondered why she was in the hospital for so long, why God continued to commit sacrilege on her golden heart, but he thought he would take over of God's duties, as the world was already wrecked, destroyed, full of ruin, that it often made people wonder if there was a god at all.

There was no real god until he came into being.

"Sonic, how much…further?"

Her voice was plaintive, her eyes seeming to be full of tears. Her feet were burning with frost; her body kept shivering from the winter wasteland of Indiana, the forest and woods broken apart in many pieces after God was angry and wrought the land with a tornado a summer ago. It was beginning to laminate with darkness, the city lights seeming to be so far away. They were like small eyes across the ocean, the ocean of snow that lied waiting like crocodiles in watering holes.

He held her close. He hoped his warmth was enough to fill her soul with hope. But her eyes wanted to ask him why he did what he did. His knife still was dressed in blood, the shining red gown seeming so dark, as dark as the night that awaited them.

Her father's blood was so black. It should've been, because he was such an awful father, an awful man who didn't care at all for his child and wife. He knew he beat them both until their bodies gave out and vomited black and blue bruises, he knew he did, and he was sure he did so much more to his sweet Annabelle, the girl whose sanctity couldn't be tainted by his rotten fingers, the fingers that decayed everything they touched.

Her mother, oh her mother…She didn't deserve to die, but she couldn't take care of her either. She was sick too. Sick with trauma that he couldn't fix. She didn't believe in his magic, in his vividness, in his glowing salubrious abilities. He couldn't help adults. He considered them and their actions too far gone. He could only help developing minds, minds that were still green with growth, and he would lend a hand to them, any of them, but soon, they grew up, they faded away from his reach, and like a watercolor painting to drowning water, they simply ran across his pages, his mind, and he couldn't forget them, but they forgot him, and the colors remained, but they were no longer versicolor and full of different hues and full of the imagination the original picture had.

Reality was hard. It bit them until they became hard, concrete individuals. Their hands soon became large, their nails became long, their teeth grew sharper, and their hair becomes pointy, static, like quills, and they were monsters. Monsters with briefcases and portfolios and cigarettes and cigars and meth and crack and pot and knowledge of the world. He wished they stayed the same age every year, like in cartoons that ran on for years that forgot time even existed, but he knew it was purely the child's decision to wish to remain youthful, like Peter Pan, or to grow up, and become beasts he no longer recognized. Schiza became a woman, a woman who no longer cared for her stuffed toys and he imagined her wearing lipstick and makeup and rouge and going out to parties and meeting other men and getting into relationships and finally getting married and having children of her own. She had no time for imagination. She no time for play and make believe. As her father and mother abandoned her, he felt abandoned; a stuffed toy left alone in the playground, and the lives and vivacity of children was his vice, the only thing he lived on. Crows were only black because they were painted that way by God, only given a dark and mysterious presence by the media, by Edgar Allen Poe and the culture of the people he represented, the Indians.

Crows were gifted with great intelligence, and he knew he could convince Annabelle that innocence and the age of six was a great age to live every year, but her sickness, her pain and her bleeding heart! He could mend everything, in a castle very far away, placed by the seashore, where the wind would caress her silver, soon golden hair, and her voice could sing like the sirens in Greek legend, and she could soon grow and no longer want the reality or the truth of the world, but stay with him, her real father, the one who cared, the one who didn't sacrifice so much beyond her needs and purely for his own gain.

The wind became harsh. He could imagine it as thin needles inserting inside his skin, draining his blood. They lied on the forest floor, listening to the sounds of the owls that hooted in the distance, and he could tell that Annabelle felt afraid, as she no longer was lying on a warm bed with someone to sing her lullabies or to read her a story, like both of her fathers did, and was freezing in the Snow Queen's grasp, and if she wasn't with a god who would make sure she wouldn't die, she thought she would die of hypothermia, her body feeling clammy, ice cold, until Sonic wrapped her in a blanket made of stars, as his fur was touched with her fingers, his body feeling like an electric blanket as he came closer, and he put a hand on her heart, to know she was still alive. Still beating and breathing.

"Are we going to be okay Sonic?" she asked, her voice full of doubt. She had never been this far from home. She could feel her hands shaking despite the warmth of the stars and his body, and she looked at the remaining stars and wandered if this would be the last night she would see of them, and of the moon that lingered like a white swollen eye.

"Yes," he said. "Yes we will be. I will make sure everything is alright, my princess. I will make sure you get a castle and a fairy dress and everything you ever wanted by the sea, in the summer breeze. I will make winter nonexistent; I will make you happy and livid, your lids never taking you away from the vitality of childhood and the warm surge of innocence. You're with me now, and I will make everything be."

She thought Sonic wasn't talking in his usual manner, but instead, in the way she knew poets and wordsmiths spoke. She could feel his hand touching hers, and she thought that maybe Sonic himself, a god, needed to visit the same hospital she was in. Because the nurses kept affirming that she was sick, and she began to believe that Sonic was sick, delirious with fever, with passion. She heard some patients she heard across the ward talk like this, nurses stating they had bipolar, but she continued to believe in his words, his gentle confirmations that everything truly was going to be fine, his chest rising and falling like the snow, as he continued to breathe in the frigid air, his lungs intoxicated with cold, his body shivering under the faint light of the city.

"Sonic…do you need a blanket? Something to keep you warm?"

His eyes were affixed to the ceiling of the world. He continued to stare, his bladed pupils continuing to cut across the galaxy, and he said, "No, I'm fine. I'd rather suffer than you."

She wondered if gods could still have hypothermia. His body felt like a furnace, but yet he was so cold.

"I wished…you were warm, Sonic. I don't want you cold. I want you safe. You can die out here, and I can too. But if you say everything is going to be okay then…I believe you. But…it's hard believing you sometimes, Sonic."

The cold was gone. But yet the coldness of her words remained on his heart.

—

She gazed at the old, scarred body of her husband. She imagined a thousand maggots, a thousand worms, a thousand beetles crawling through his veined body and his cut, disorganized, bloody, sackless body. The doctors have kept telling her that there was nothing they could do now, because the man, her husband, and the man she met what seemed to be eons ago and has protected her and her daughter for so long, he was gone. He was murdered by a stuffed toy obsessed with the idea of innocence and righteousness.

She looked at his decaying body, his withered, gutless body, and she wished that he would come right back to her, his hands no longer old and like a dying weed, but his hands young and full of warmth and joy, as the man was over his daughter, the daughter he cared about so much to take a job selling meth.

Did she believe it was right? No. But it meant he still loved her, and couldn't find any other way to pay her costs, her hospital bills, because of this crumbling society and its constant punishment over the once middle class Midwesterners.

She had no one else to mend her wounds, the father to her withered rose that was inside her body.

It used to have so much color, a bloody red that bled inside her heart. Now her father who never cared about her had taken it away and made it crumple, ripe with disease and filth, and she was sick, oh so sick, and her husband, he was gone and could no longer help her. He could no longer find where their daughter was and where this stuffed beast was taking her. She asked the police and the doctors on her whereabouts, and now they no longer knew, as the small playhouse was empty, and everything was still inside except her daughter and the hedgehog. And they all feared the worst, that they were both dead.

She saw the stuffed toy bleeding. Her husband shot him through his chest. He was certain to die, but yet he flew up in the mountain and swooped down and took their daughter. The police already assumed she was killed and considered it a solved case, turning a blind eye to how this creature even became alive and why he wanted to take their daughter in the first place. Ed was right: the police were bloody useless. They only cared about speeding tickets and seatbelt violations and anything involving illegal drugs. She thought they once would charge Ed with drug paraphernalia and cooking meth in his home, but they never saw anything about that either. Their eyes were blind, sewn shut, and they continued to look onto the unimportant cases with a gun in their hand and a badge on their chest, even if they didn't rightly deserve it.

Before the police found the body of Edward, she took his pistol from his hand. And now she had it in her hand, gazing over at the silver that shone on the moonlit night. She could see the moon's face reflect on it, its pointed nose going into her ideas, her tribulations over the revenge of the death of her husband, the kidnapping of her daughter. Only the moon knew, not the police, and the moon couldn't do anything but cut the sky with its sharp bladed edges and make the night as dreary and as dead as she believed it to be.

She considered the monster, the beast; she considered it with a God complex. It thought it could become God, so it took away her daughter, and thought it would be the rightful father. But there was no court document telling them he could have their daughter because they were neglectful parents. How dare it automatically assume Edward was a bad father! And she could tell it judged her too, with her body completely encased in saran-wrap. It kept her alive. It kept her together. They were all a perfect, normal, mentally ill, fucked up family who could take care of their daughter and give her everything she needed.

She loaded the golden bullet inside it, and her hand felt like squeezing the trigger on anything that moved. Her teeth clenched as she thought of all the injustices committed against her, the death of Ed, the death of her right to have her daughter, the death of the justice system. It all died, wasted away, under this monster that was made of felt and a golden heart, who told her she couldn't have her life, both of her lives, encased in tightly saran-wrapped cluster, inside their pale egg yellow home!

The gun clicked, and she imagined the bullet hurtling towards his chest again, killing him this time. Never being able to fly and take their sweet little Annabelle Wayne again. His wings were cloaked with shit, his eyes were barbed wire, and his smile, it was rotting of flies and locusts.

It was Satan-incarnate, and she was never going to let him get his way with her daughter, traumatize her, scar her, do anything his white pale hands could do. Its quills could impale the police when they came by, its speed could outrun the police cars, but not her. She was relentless. And her daughter belonged in their home, away from the winter forests, away from the foxes and coyotes and the prickled monsters who wished to devour her for sustenance as children were made with sweet meat, and she will give it the same hell she brought to her when she found out her husband was dead, as dead as her, as dead as her daughter could be. And God save them all, because she knew she would commit the act of killing a god, an act that was considered only possible in the Greek times, but she was going to be her daughter's Odysseus, rescuing her Persephone from Hades.

The gun never left her hand as she searched for her. It remained locked, the finger close to igniting the flames inside. The bullet was reserved for a god's felt metallic golden heart that was truly black and full of coal and ashes inside.

She knew her daughter wasn't dead. She knew she was still alive, cold, and hungry. In need of her mother's warm embrace, to be reminded that she was the one who fed her through her breasts, and her father was the one who took care of her while she was stoutly-legged and her hair were in pigtails and her blue vivacious eyes gleamed like a mirror into their joy, their triumphs in raising a little girl who loved and cared about so many people, who even poured her heart for the suffering of the other patients back at the Terre Haute Asylum.

She wasn't gone. She was still here, being hidden by this creature, this monster who took her away her sun and the moon and the stars from her life, which would now pluck out her eyes and pluck out the red strings of her heart.

She was going to find him. She was going to kill the raven, and forever it would live nevermore.

—

The morning came, the sun ripe like a peach. The winter harshness hadn't left the forest, as immediately as Annabelle lifted her cloak of stars, she began to shiver again, the air feeling as prickled as her new father, Sonic. She remembered in those few seconds she met the air how warm, how soft Sonic's body felt, and she immediately wanted to be close to it again, even if the hedgehog was spouting lies and mistruths about her parents, her family. His mind ached, and he could feel the sallow and pinpricked feeling of mania console him again, and although his blanket was as warm as himself, he could feel his skin endure the stabbing pain of the frigid air, and his legs, although he was a god, were sore, and he imagined Annabelle's were as well.

The castle, by the sea, protected from anyone who wished to get her away from him. It was going to happen. He would turn the snowflakes into fire, the snow blankets into thorns, into roses.

She would wish for it, she would wish for everything she could and couldn't have, and his dear child, she wasn't wishing for anything, not even any food to last them in this wilderness. Oh, his daughter, how she didn't desire anything in the world except for companionship! How she only wished for him to be alive again after he was shot, and oh how she desired only his compassion and love! But he knew his daughter wasn't a god, not just yet, so he told her to wish for any food she wanted, before they would go back to living in the wilderness in a castle that was by the now newly fallen sand, the waves that tickled the castle's moors as it caressed up the shore.

She wrapped herself in the blanket again, her cheeks red and imbued with heat, and she wished that she could live in the blankets forever and not in a castle, but she never told Sonic her real wish, and she wished for the castle to rise from the ashes of the snow and into a sultry beach where they could hear the ocean's utterances and the cries of birds, and that she actually missed her father, and she wished she could talk to her mother about this, but she wasn't sure if she was alive either, possibly buried in the snow drifts along with her father, with the divinity blade searing across his chest.

The castle was growing. But she wasn't proud of both the god's and her creation.

She felt homesick. Lonely, even if this caring god was by her. She wanted to go back to her warm home, which once smelled of gingerbread during the winter season before she was admitted to the asylum, the house that looked like the bright smiling yolk of the sun, the house that had warm beds and home cooked meals from her mother made for her simple specifications. Sonic had told her small things of why her parents couldn't be with her anymore as they talked in that small playhouse, but she missed them, and knew they cared about her. She always remembered her mother's embrace, the games of dress up they played, the games of helicopter she played with her father, sitting on his lap and reading the Comics section of the newspaper and sharing a laugh together. She was a simple girl, with simple desires, and she thought Sonic didn't understand this, even with his omniscient knowledge and presence.

"I'm really not hungry, Sonic. I'm too nervous. I just want to go home. And I want my daddy back, and my mommy back too."

The words pierced him. She couldn't have wanted to come back to her parents, her falsified parents who took away everything from her! Her freedom of choice, her purity, her innocence and her joy at living inside her own world! And even if she wished for it, he killed her father for a special purpose, a purpose of retribution, a sense that he couldn't raise her in the way he wanted her to be.

She would just end up like Schiza, like the other girls he took care of. Abused, hurt, scarred, damaged. It wasn't too late to change these things. She could fill her purpose, her purpose at being a goddess, any little girl's dream of being princess of the world, having everything she wanted at her fingertips.

"No Sonic, I…like you, but I want to see my dad again. I don't know what happened to him really. And my mommy, I miss her too. I hope she's okay. I hope they're both okay. You…wouldn't tell me a lie, would you, Sonic? Is my dad okay? You didn't…hurt him, did you? Cause I…think you did."

The blood that continued to cover the blade. He hoped she would never have to see it. The truth of her father could never be revealed. Much like a parent's drug problem. Another monster that had to be hidden under the carpet until it came out with voracious fangs and long black raking claws.

"No, he's fine. He's looking for you right now. He's hoping you're okay too. And I will tell him you are."

It was a half truth. He was sure he was still looking for her down in the black tar pits of Hell. And he was going to know she would be fine. Because her real daddy was here. And daddy was going to make everything okay. And daddy was going to make all her troubles disappear, all the creatures and demons she had in her visions, daddy was going to kill them all and make sure they will pay for being heathens and molesters.

"Are you sure you're not lying?"

He nodded his head, his green glazed eyes burning the specks of crystal from the sky, as the heat began to resonate in the skies, and Annabelle could hear the rumbling of the ocean, the shrill calls of seagulls, the swaying mossy grass at the dunes in the beach, and the skies were blue, a cerulean scar jutted across the silver sky.

The castle was rising further, his gift to her, the gift of being a princess, a goddess of the world that he helped be a part of when God created all of these gods in this miserable, maggot-infested, decaying world that was torn by war and poverty. He would make sure he could create a better world, with his sweet princess who could imagine anything inside her mind. Her creativity that burst to life with just a whisper of breath, a flicker of her eyes.

Her gun was still loaded. And her fingers were still itched to press the trigger against his temple.

She began to sweat. The winter frost was beginning to fade away, like a healing wound, and into a cloudless summer sky, with seagulls gliding the warm air, the vaporous sun drifting in the sky.

Truly a god was at play here, and he chose her daughter to play with. And she couldn't find a single reason why her daughter was chosen among the many other children out there, the millions of children that possibly weren't as privileged as Annabelle to have her own god-like stuffed animal to talk to her.

She wrapped her hair into a ponytail, as she chewed on a cigarette, hoping to get some tobacco and nicotine in her system. Her husband always loved Camels, and she continued to smoke them although she preferred Newport's. She always imagined they would share cigarettes, their lips always meeting on a half smoked cigarette. And she missed him more dearly as she gazed at the sun, seeing the tall castle that was growing like a snake poking its head out of the sea. She knew the beast had reason to take her. He was going to make her the queen of the world. To have her child do everything she wanted, to have everything she wanted. She knew the beast was immediately a bad father permitting her that. What if she wanted mommy's cigarettes? What if she wanted daddy's meth? She couldn't have everything she wanted in the world. Children had to grow up to make choices before they could be allowed to smoke both mommy's and daddy's cigarettes and meth. Children always grew up, and some were sour and despicable. It was a fact of life. Some children were sour and despicable already and grew up to be good people. She thought the beast didn't know of that also.

The facts about this beast were beginning to envelop in her mind. There was something she knew about it, even if she never personally met it. As if she had dealt with gods before. As if a god had once entered her life, an angel who told her everything was going to be okay when her father assaulted her, and made her organs become brown and wrinkled by his touch.

She wondered if she met this beast before. And that he wasn't such a beast after all. But she couldn't forgive him for stealing her daughter. Like her father who hurt her so deeply that she imagined her organs were cold and gray, this beast had raked out her eyes, had raked her forlorn heart, and made her suffer for not being the perfect parent. She was fucked up. She knew it. But it still didn't mean she was abusive or neglectful. She loved her daughter. She loved her family, her husband who was still cut open on the cold steel cart, the doctors claiming they couldn't save him. She wondered if she would feel the same way if her father died, the same way her husband did, but she thought she would laugh and that he was touched with the same wretched fingers he gave to his daughter.

Her gun felt heavy in her hands. She felt as if she was carrying the world with her, the world that depended on her as much as her baby girl, who needed to be fed, given attention, sang to at bedtime. She was going to give the world everything it needed, as it was curled up on the sun's bosom. Her hands felt the sweat of the mother sun, the gun, the world, nearly slipping from her grasp, but she knew that a god had to die, had to be sent to the underworld with Hades along with all the other dead spirits. Suffering in eternity, which made sense for his painted black wings, the wings that casted hatred on anyone. She knew it worked on her, as she hated him. She hated him as much as her father had hated her for her body, her delicate, porcelain body that cracked at its seams, which seeped all her blood and truths and her sorrow.

She walked towards the rising castle, and she knew she would climb all the stairs for her little darling. She couldn't have everything in the world; else she would end up like her, a sagging old desecrating prostitute who tried to pay all her little bills at the little asylum.

Her husband would be avenged. He wasn't a perfect father, or a perfect husband, but she was his, and the beast couldn't take all the people she loved from her world. Her sun and moon and stars. The crow would have to pluck all those things from his feathers again, the wings that hid sin and despair from her daughter.


	10. X (Happy)

**AN: I finished this story (and will upload the rest of the chapters soon) but I couldn't decide on which ending would fit or was more logical, and I felt like I didn't write this chapter well enough and instead babied Sonic for what he did, so there are two alternate chapters for chapter 10. This one is the happier outcome, while the other is the more depressing, dark outcome, and I guess you yourself can decide which ending is better, as some people reading this story may prefer a happier ending or they may feel like the sad ending fits better.**

**Of course, this is probably against the rules as it seems like it's an interactive story of some sort, but maybe one day I may decide to just shorten it to one ending while I'm looking over this story again, even though it was not really an ambitious project but more of a small, side story to Schiza, and you can either believe in the story's moral of forgiveness, or you can believe in Sonic's decline after the trauma of what happened to Schiza.**

"Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted, my little princess?"

She sat at her pink throne, with a crown made of silver and rubies and diamonds and sapphires, the finest in the world, and she sat staring at the elaborate castle he made for her at her command, and all she could think of was that she just wanted her father, her real father back to live in this castle with her, her mother being the queen, her father the king. But she sat looking sad, melancholic, and wondered if Sonic was truly doing the right things in the end. He was an angel, but she began to think of him as a vengeful angel, who wanted revenge for some past misdeeds committed by someone evil, but she knew it couldn't have been her father. Her father was a nice man, a working man, who simply tried to pay for his daughter's intuition, her bills and her school supplies, even if she hated school the one year she went into it before she was locked away in the quietest place in the world.

She could tell Sonic was reading her mind about school, and he wondered if she didn't want the oppressing school system in her world anymore. Children no longer listening to adults who truly didn't understand their issues, who continued to put them in this jail house, where they were forced to no longer be individuals but people who were nothing, nobodies who didn't have anything to stand out, a gray matching the rest of the schoolwork they had to do, blending in the white concrete walls, no longer children with the imagination, but dead in the mind, dead in the heart.

"I know Sonic, but…" She looked up in his eyes, the serrated edges seeming to separate her own eyes, and she hoped Sonic didn't think of harming her, but she knew he wouldn't. He was just carried away. Thinking that she was his, his daughter, even if she believed she belonged to the father she had known for so long.

"But school is there for a reason, Sonic. People like me need to learn. My mom and dad told me the school…system wasn't the best, but these things are going to change, Sonic. They'll become better. And if I make them gone, they won't be good anymore. They'll be gone, and no one can learn. And I…really don't want that. I don't want to take away what is happy for some children. Some like to learn. And I can't be mean and take that away."

He nodded his head and closed his eyes, tightly.

A tinge of regret began to fill in his head.

_I don't want to take away what is happy for some children…_

Her kindness. How she cared for everyone else. He never met such a child with such generosity. And he glanced back at the blade he held at his torso, the blade that was still stained with the blood of the sinful, the blood of those that possibly didn't need to be killed, simply for revenge.

Schiza's father. He was a disgusting man who defiled his daughter who he considered was beautiful and smart and brave. He hurt her. And he was his fury over what he did to her, as the blankets became full of not pink fluff and a safe place for her rest, but seeping of blood and semen, and he watched her as she cried, and he could do nothing. Nothing at all that he could to her father to make him pay. He wished his stitched self could suddenly rise and grip his neck and throw him across the room with his godlike strength, stabbing him in his wretched, cold, black heart. He had not even a small margin of pity for his father, even when he made him regret everything he did with the candies that the other angels gave him, and when he claimed the only way he could atone for his crimes was for him to die, as he attempted suicide by hanging himself before he was sent to solitary confinement, and Sonic thought he could grant him his wish, by stabbing him in the neck.

But Schiza told him that she would've rather had her father live with the regret than to be granted to die. And it was so unlike him to commit an assisted suicide, but he told him that he wanted to take away all those evil things from her, and even tried to kill another father who had drained this little girl of her life, but he could only do so little when he took care of her. He was ordered to only care for her as an infant, as her own parents were often away, at work and in the bars, getting drunk.

He still remembered her smiling, toothless face as he played with her. As he fed her. He wished he could be with her again, but she also grew up and had children, no longer allowed to have a guardian. It was such a short moment he was with her, and he missed it dearly. He wanted to touch those small, fragile fingers again and let her know that everything was alright. She could tell she loved him when she was a baby and even wanted her to replace her evil father and her neglectful mother, but God told her she was going to be a strong lady, and she wouldn't need his help going through her father's torturous abuse.

He couldn't forgive Him after that.

But this wonderful girl loved her parents. And she felt she was abandoning her of the ones who were truly meant to take care of her. He felt when he was with the other girls; they took care of him with their happiness and joy. But Annabelle wasn't happy. She wished to return home. And he couldn't bear to see a sad child, especially one that looked as if she was going to cry, even when she viewed the beautiful landscape of the beach, the ocean breeze keeping her eyes alive with the flow of salty tears.

She wanted to see her mother and father, her father now dead because of him.

He deprived her of what could've been a good father. He was depriving her of her mother, who was possibly mourning the loss of her husband. He tore away the world from her, a world that he claimed was so privileged, but she wasn't happy here. He could tell. She was sad, tired, and it wasn't a good place for her aching mind to rest, unlike a home she had known for so long, with parents who kissed her goodnight every night, told her stories, and told to keep a smile on her face because the next day would be so much better.

He took that away from her. He began to believe that he wasn't much better than the nurses at the hospital, telling her she couldn't use her creativity, else her mental illness would seep through her fragile skull and into the world.

He sighed. He knew that this delusion of his couldn't work anymore. His mind was so set to creating a new world for both of them to enjoy, but if Annabelle truly wasn't happy, he wasn't happy either.

And the acts he committed. He knew the man upstairs wouldn't be so happy about it. He thought he would've turned a blind eye towards the death of Schiza's father after he allowed the other girl's father to live, but he continued to believe that these fathers, all of them were awful pigs who only cared about their own orgasms, their own hunger for fresh flesh, but he knew Annabelle would've told him that she was never abused by her father. He could read it in her mind.

"Annabelle…" He got closer to her face, inside her cold cut diamond eyes, and she could feel the warmth emanating again, the golden ring of his heart echoing out to hers, and he leaned over and gave her a tight hug, a hug that she could feel herself enveloping into Sonic's body, his warm fur, his ever loud heart, and she wished she could stay in this hug forever, with her parents back home, with her pale speckled yellow home back, the mansion her father paid for with good, honest work.

"What do you wish for, anything in the world, anything at all that you desire? Obviously you don't want this. You don't want this castle by the sea, with your sadness so blue like the ocean we're next to. Tell me anything you want, anything at all, and I will grant it to you. I promise. I won't make you go through this anymore. You obviously want to be back with your real mother and father, and I can't deprive them from you, like you said you don't want to get rid of what is a source of happiness for these children. I can take away all the pain in the world that continues to stab you…"

She kicked open the door of the royal castle, her ponytail becoming grayer as she entered the rooms ornate with elaborate designs and white pearly walls and silver opal floors, and she could feel her skin becoming more dried like a prune with all the moisture sucked out, her saran-wrap becoming more loose. She feared that her organs would spill out, and the beast would know how dead, how decayed she was, how she was a corpse that was still alive, and her fingers were shaking, the gun was rattling throughout the halls, and she feared that any time now the gun who loosen from her grasp and she would fire at the rubber-encased walls and into her dead body.

Why, of course she could aim this gun at herself. She was dead enough already. Might as well complete the funeral, complete the dress she was wearing and make it black, that showed the midriffs of her knees, how chapped and dried they were because of the winter that seemed to have gone away like a flickering light.

She needed another cigarette. But her fingers rattled like the gun, the cigs constantly dropping on the ground that suddenly reminded her of bird shit. She kept dropping her lighter too, the silver encased top splitting open. She didn't feel this nervous about killing the bastard who killed her husband and stole her daughter. Why was she shaking, why would her fingers not work, why was her skin wrinkled and old, why were her eyes no longer as vibrant as they were, the colors beginning to droop away from her vision like a bleeding painting?

Her legs were weaker. She could barely run without her believing her bones would break. But she had a destination in mind, and no matter if she needed a cane now, she kept running, oh how out of breath she was becoming! There was not enough oxygen in the world for her lungs!

She could hear talking in the next room. The beast speaking to her little girl. It was quiet otherwise, as their voices were barely above a whisper. She held the gun in her wispy hands and eavesdropped on them, as she wished suddenly she didn't stomp out her cigarettes in frustration and decided to get rid of her pot collection that was in her room, because of her little girl that was in such danger, the little girl who she knew could have everything in the world now.

The voices were small whips of wind reaching her ears. She thought she needed a hearing aid now as she tried to listen to their peeping whispers, the beast doing something to her daughter that she knew she couldn't approve of.

"Sonic, I only made this castle because I thought…that was what you wanted. To make me live by the sea, by the seashore, and you would make me princess of the world. But I didn't want that. I just…wanted to go home."

"I know. I forced all those things on you, and I shouldn't. I was like your father, forcing everything on you when you didn't want to go. But if you tell me your father wasn't such a bad guy, I believe you. I can't believe in lies from you. But I've committed many horrible acts Annabelle, acts that I can't tell you why I did them, as you are too young to figure these things out. But Annabelle, I know what deep inside your heart what you wish for, and I will bring it to you, and you have to promise me that you will make sure that your mom and dad are protecting you and giving everything you need, otherwise you can ask the big man upstairs to take them away from you, and we will."

"Or CPS? I heard CPS takes you away from bad mommies and daddies too."

"Yes, them too. And your father…I will wish for you to make everything okay for him, and that he no longer has this dark secret that he's been hiding from you for so long, but you can still remain in your house. Your mother, she is okay, but she is sick in the mind, like you are, and I will wish for her to no longer keep this dark secret from you too. I can't grant that sickness away from her, but I can at least give her a somewhat better shot at life, and I can do the same for you."

"You mean I will have to go back to the hospital? Please don't say that Sonic! I don't want to go back to the hospital! They're mean to me! They give me these pills that make me not me! I have to sleep with belts covering me! Please don't take me there!"

He shook his head slowly, as if in disapproval of the hospital's methods of keeping her mentally healthy. He truly wished he could take her away from the grips of her schizophrenia, but he could at least wish she was in a much better hospital, a hospital that could understand children like her.

"I'll put you in a better hospital than that asylum they kept you in. Basically I'm going to make everything go back to normal, but you will have a better chance at life too. I don't want you in that cruddy hospital anymore either, Anna. They might have to travel a little bit to visit you, but it's a much better place. You don't need a hospital like that, my princess. You deserve better."

Her mother, although her hearing was failing, she could hear enough of what he managed to crackle above his whispers. That he took away, also, her daughter's sun and moon and stars, and that he was willing to bring all of them back, even her father back to life, and back to an ordinary life, except in a better hospital, a better way for all of them to live.

Regret. It changed people. She wondered what suddenly made him believe that he was after all the villain, the one who took away the hungry and lonely baby bird from the nest, away from its mother.

She still had an urge to shoot this monster, even if it was beginning to realize his errors. He was still a murderer, through and through, red blood through red blood that cascaded from her husband. As she lied against the door, she was losing her teeth, as each white shard fragment began to fall from her lips and into her veiny hands. Her hair was becoming unkempt, as the pony tail no longer made her seem young and attractive, but a hag, just like what she imagined Edward's mother to be, the schizophrenic loony that wore nothing but pastel blue cotton robes and slippers and her teeth were deteriorating and her hair was matted and her skin full of scars and insects that she claimed were planted by the FBI.

Her only son never came to visit her. But she immediately could come to mind what her mother looked like. Because Annabelle looked nearly like that before, listening to her voices, hurting her mommy and daddy because an evil voice told her to.

And that was why she was in the asylum. Because they feared the worst for her.

It was a terrible hospital, but it was all they could find in Terre Haute. She once was in a nice hospital, until the voices ordered her to try to attempt suicide and hurt the other children patients and she claimed the nurses were speaking with twisted, Satanic tongues, and she was admitted to the Terre Haute Asylum.

She wished that Sonic, this beast, could take away her insanity, but he said he couldn't, and he said the same to her daughter again. That God couldn't take away people's illnesses, and neither could he, because God wanted people to be strong, to conquer through them, because truly, God couldn't solve everything, and he wanted his creations to get through them, because he truly believed in them.

The gun was still lodged in her hands. But it was beginning to shake. Her wrinkled eyes were full of tears.

"Will God be mad at you for doing this stuff, Sonic? I…really hope you won't be punished…"

He sighed, closed his lids again, listening to the sound of breathing from the other door. "Unfortunately, I will have to admit that I've done terrible things. And I regret them. I will be punished, maybe not as severely, but I must pay my dues. Humans error sometimes because other humans error and do bad things to them, and this…was the case with my fear of you being abused. But you clearly aren't. But I think the important thing is that you're okay, and you're loved, and you're lucky, and that's all I want. Annabelle, I can tell your mother is suffering the effects of the curse of the castle to the adults, and I will let you talk to her before I go. I'm sorry, and I will try my best to make everything better again. But I can only do so much. Gods may have such great powers, but even they, can only do so much."

The door opened, as if the wind grew a hand and realized that Annabelle's mother was there, greeting her like a guest with a bow.

Her knees were tired. Her hands were tired, inflamed with arthritis. Her witch hands reached towards her, and she cried as she clasped Annabelle in her arms, dropping the gun by her feet. It didn't fire, as if by some miracle. The gun continued to lie, with still only one bullet inside of it, free of blood and anger. God was at work, she thought.

"Annabelle, I…" She brushed her silver hair with the stroke of her hand, and Anna could catch the hints of a few tears in her long stringy eyelashes.

"I hoped he didn't…hurt you. He hurt your father and I just…can't forgive him for that, even if he is bringing him to life. Just like I could never forgive my…"

She stopped. She couldn't forgive her father either, for the evil he committed. His evil fingers had damaged so much of her. Even if he was planning to have a better life, she would refuse to speak to him. And even if this Sonic claimed he would pay for his sins, she couldn't forgive him either, for his evil bladed fingers had killed her husband. She couldn't forgive them for the damage they both caused to her, her mind wrecking even more with filth with the worms.

"It's…" She thought of what he could've done to her father. Did he murder him? And why? Because he was afraid she was being abused? If he was going to be okay in the end, that was all that mattered, but she kept reassuring her mother that he hadn't hurt her.

"He was a guardian. A guardian who cared too much. I think something happened to him that made him that way. Like he told me stuff happened to you that made you ill. I think he didn't really mean to be this way, he's just scared. Like you tell me mommy, he got carried away. Too carried away."

Fear was still contained in his heart. He wanted to protect more children like he used to, along with Schiza, along with the other girls, but now he knew that was over. God wasn't going to allow him to be a guardian angel. He hurt too much to be an effective one.

"I'm sorry, Cassandra." She was surprised that he already knew her name, but she forgot that he was a god, a god that defended the unfortunate, but while Annabelle had an unfortunate life with her mental illness, she had good parents. And this god never realized that bad parents aren't always the case with the unfortunate children.

"I'm sorry, and I will make everything like the way it was supposed to be. You back with Edward, your husband. Both of you back with your daughter, who rightly belongs to you. And I cannot make everything bad go away, but I can at least make it a little better to deal with. I will take your daughter to a state of the art psychiatric hospital, and you can visit her once in a while, even if the travel is long. And I will make everything better for you too. You should also get some help, and maybe someday, you will convince your father can't damage everything in your body. I know you will never forgive me for what I did. But that's fine. You don't have to. Just promise to take care of Annabelle, and make her a happy and healthy girl. She really is wonderful, and I realized that when I was with her. I didn't hurt her, but I knew that I couldn't continue doing this. Just do that favor for me, and I will watch out for her, as much as I can."

Annabelle's hair began to regain her color, the chestnut brown returning, and Cassandra was no longer a wrinkled, stocky monster that had wiry hair and missing teeth, but she was herself again, her long pink arms pulling Annabelle closer, and they both laughed cheerily, as Sonic smiled gently, and with one click of his fingers, the whole room became white, empty, a vast void that devoured all the past events, the kidnapping of Annabelle, the death of Edward, the policemen finding out there was a tall blue mountain in the middle of the wilderness in Indiana, all those events vanished and dissolved away like acid, like a sketch in water, and soon, a new sketch appeared that God began to draw with his pen, a sketch that involved a much better life with Annabelle, Edward, and Cassandra, and a better life for Sonic too, as he promised to repent for his misdeeds.

—-

Annabelle woke up, the sunlight greeting her face. She was in a completely white bed with a pastel yellow wall, and her blanket wasn't too small, but just right, even larger than her body, and it wasn't thin, but warm, just like the blanket of stars that suddenly popped into her mind, but couldn't at all remember where the memory was from.

"Annabelle, it's time for breakfast! You don't want to miss having pancakes, do you?"

She rubbed her eyes, wiping them away of the old memories and the sleepiness of such a long slumber. As she stumbled out of her room, she asked one of the nurses what kind of hospital this was.

"This is McLean hospital. Don't you remember being admitted here, sweetie? I think the last hospital ordered too much medicine that made you tired, but we'll see if we can find a good combination for you. You must be tired after that long trip from that Terre Haute place to here."

She smiled. "Yeah, I had a long day. A very long day. But wow, Terre Haute never served pancakes! They always gave us something that always was cold and soggy."

"Well, get dressed then, sweetie. I promise you you're in good hands now. Terre Haute is pretty much for people who really do have issues but…you always seemed like such a friendly girl to me."

"Can I bring Sonic with me? He was given to me by some girl who I've never known but…I really like him, and I think we're going to be very good friends."

"Of course you can! Just make sure you don't get syrup all over him!"

She went in her room as she went inside the blue cupboards, her fragile little hands picking up a smiling, and soft Sonic plush that seemed to have luminescent eyes that were no longer blades, but a light that would shine for her, and make sure any darkness would never reach her, like the darkness that happened in times long past, times that were swallowed away by the sun and the moon.

And she brought him to the lunch room, clasped in her hands, as she watched the ravens fly away in the cold snow topped playgrounds, their caws unheard in her soft, fragile ears.


	11. X (Sad)

"Are you happy now my dear princess? Are you happy now?"

She sat, gazing at all the presents he gave her. A castle built with the enamel of pearls and diamonds, a seashore that drifted and crashed against the walls, the salty air always stinging her nose as she sniffed it, the ocean smelling sweet…The castle smelled of lilies, the throne she was sitting was ordained with gold and priceless rubies and sapphires and emeralds, and her crown, it sparkled with fragmented light, the purest light shining in all of the world. She was the princess of the world, able to have anything she wanted, everything she wanted, and this sweet little girl could change the world. She could make the gods obey her, she could make roses bloom in winter, she could make it snow in autumn, she could make the leaves blue and purple, she could make it always summer weather in all of the world and never again would winter's touch of death would kill the trees and the land, and she could have all the people in the world kind and genial, and she could make all the evil, wretched people melt to the earth like a ball of mercury, always seeping into the dark heated sultry land of Hell.

But yet, as she had all this power in the world, her fingertips so strong, so red from the summer's heat, she told him she didn't want it. She didn't want anything. And she would like to go home.

"Please Sonic? Please?"

Her fingertips tapped at the golden throne. It already was ruined with smudgy fingerprints, of the ice cream she ate that her servants gave her with their golden bowls and golden spoons and even the ice cream had several bits of shredded gold inside it.

Sonic frowned sharply, but he thought he had done everything to appease her. Even if they had to escape into the winter wilderness, with the threat of the police and her father rising from the ashes looming over him. She still wasn't aware that her father had died. And he wished he could tell her the truth, that her father was gone, because he was a bad man, a bad man with black teeth and black claws and sharp hair, and never again would he hurt his precious daughter, the girl who needed everything in the world to be happy.

But he thought it would hurt her, the needles pricking her brain so much, the truth that was much like a puffer fish fully inflated when his tongue had told her the sweet sins of the truth. His blade continued to bleed over his waist, the blood sinking to the floor and wetting the throne room, the blood of her father that she dearly missed.

The golden purity, it was yet again tainted with the prints of sin.

The blood reminded her of something, but as she stared at it, her eyes like sharp diamonds, she couldn't tell the blood belonged to him, the man who loved her, the man who sacrificed so much to her, the father who took up a deadly job to pay for her bills.

He felt his hands being stained with blood. The inkwell beginning to spread, like an encompassing fire, and as he slowly pricked his ears, he believed he could hear hoarse breathing, the breathing of a wicked hag, a wicked witch who wanted to curse him for taking away her company to a sad torrent of loneliness.

He could hear the click of a gun, the metal edge of the pistol being inserted in his ear, his eyes, also, being pricked apart.

"You took her away from me," she said.

He said nothing, as his daughter continued to watch the event unfold before her, her expression flat, gray, emotionless. He wondered if she was beginning to have negative symptoms of her schizophrenia, caused by trauma, stress. But he could hear her fingers rustling on the trigger, about to pull it, about to make the god rest in his Indian grave.

"You took her away from me," she said.

He could feel her breath on his fur, on his skin. It smelled of arsenic and nicotine, and maybe a small hint of gin. Her skin was crinkled, in folds, her fingers were withered worms, and her teeth were ghastly, a yellow fence to keep away the old rusted tongue as she continued to speak, "You took her away from me."

He nodded. She was right.

"You killed my husband."

He nodded.

"You can't make her become you. Another god. I want my daughter to be like me, human and small and frail and imperfect. She is much too young to decide to be a god. Maybe she can wait until she is an adult, until her life is so old she wonders what will happen if she lives forever to see her great grandchildren and her great great grandchildren. But she is coming with me, living a flawed life. I will never forgive you for killing my husband, my Edward. You saw him as an awful, sinful man, but I saw him as my angel, my way out of this hell I've had ever since my father had hurt me."

He could hear yet another click. His breath was stifled, he tried not to make a sound, and his rising chest was flat, a small valley, as his daughter, Annabelle, closed her hand into a fist and softly placed it on his heart.

Cassandra lowered her gun, her eyes still admonished with the fear, the hatred, but she listened, as her daughter softly spoke to him.

"Sonic…is this true? Did you…really hurt my daddy?"

He gazed into the mother's eyes. They were turning a rusty oxidized gold, as he could tell she was speaking to him fibrously through their vision, "Tell her the truth. Tell her what in God's name you did to my husband. You killed him. You killed him, you bastard."

The flames were quelling inside his eyes, the blood began to leak less as he held her hand, and said, "Yes. Yes I did, Annabelle. I…I thought he was a bad man, a man who didn't deserve to take care of you, so I…so I…killed him. It seemed to be so…long ago I had killed him. I thought of him as an evil man, a man who…"

"No!" She slammed her fists into his soft body, as her head was buried inside the beating of his cold, callous heart that was once gold, once shining like a diamond.

"You couldn't have killed my daddy! You couldn't have! I want my daddy back! I want my daddy back! I want…I want…" Her face was red, ripe with tears, as she wished she could show Sonic how his heart was so evil, so black compared to how he used to treat her and her family. Her father was murdered in a paroxysm of delusional love and protection. A murder of hate committed in the spell of love. She couldn't stand facing that her guardian, her guardian chosen by God, would commit such an act! When she saw Sonic's chest that was bleeding, his wings crooked and his breathing wretched and as bent as his wings, she wished for him to be healed, to be absolved of the blade that continued to bleed on the floor, her father's blood continuing to run a rancid red river.

"But Annabelle…I wanted the best for you. I wanted you to…be in better hands. Your parents, they're…they're…"

"They're my parents!" she shouted. "You can't kill them away, Sonic! If they've done anything bad to me, I'm sure I would tell you! But you've done…something very bad. Something very very bad. I don't want the world. I don't want everything, Sonic. I don't even want rocky road ice cream and macaroni and cheese and spaghetti every day. I…just want to go back to how everything was before. I want my mommy back. I want my daddy back. I don't want them dead. I don't want to create my own world. I just want…things to be easy and like my mommy said, 'flawed', whatever that means. I can't have this. I'm just a kid. I'm only…six…"

He could see tears drowning out her eyes. He hated to see a child cry, and he wished he could brush them away and tell her that everything would be okay, but he knew that the only thing he could do was bring back the world to her as it once was before, without the stars shining for her, without the sleight of a god's hand killing those who he deemed would hurt his precious daughter who was no longer his daughter. But just a sad little child, a sad child that he had deliberately tried to make her cry.

He sat in the throne room, the glistening sapphires and emeralds and rubies inside that all seemed to have grown sharp, demeaning eyes that knew that he was the one at fault, the killer, the slayer, the one whose goodness had died in rise of the madness, the rage he felt on the day that Schiza was raped, on the day his other daughter was also spliced open by his snakes, and he wondered if he, after all, was worthy of the title of being a god. A guardian angel. His anger had made his insides black, like a fire burning a piece of white paper, and he thought of himself as a slowly decaying creature, beginning to be curled up in all those purifying, white flames, becoming nonexistent, becoming nothing but a demon whose own pride had hurt him in the end. And the little girl, she wouldn't stop crying, as his putrid heart continued to beat dismally for her discord and snuffles, but he knew he could only do one thing to make both the wife and her child happy, as he couldn't bear himself to fully turn into that wretched raven, the one with the multiple scar-colored eyes, the sharp deviline beaks, the feathers as black as a Greek godless night.

He sighed. Cassandra waited for his next move, the gun still shaking in her elderly hands, her limbs seeming to be ready to fall due to the weight of her sacrileged organs.

"Annabelle…I will grant you your wish. I will make everything back to the way it was. You will be back in your hospital, your father will be alive, and your mother, she will have her husband, and although you are unfortunate in your illness, you weren't as unfortunate as you were with me. I…I don't know what to do anymore, Annabelle. I think I'm going to go back to God and tell him that although I've…committed some awful acts, maybe I should rest a while in Purgatory and come back again some day, maybe in another hundred years, when your family has forgotten all about me, when the world will continue to roll by without me, when new gods come in and are worshiped as much as me many years ago. I can't take away your illness from you, Miss Annabelle, but I can at least still watch from afar, making sure you're okay. Because what matters to me more is that you're happy and you're loved by your family. I made the mistake of thinking you were hurt, but you weren't, just by your illness, not by your family."

She didn't wish to be back in the Asylum, back with the long white needles telling her that she was sick in the heart and she couldn't use her imagination, but even if Sonic wished for her to be imaginative, for her to dwell in her illness, maybe the nurses had a point, even if she hated taking the horse pills.

Back in a hospital, being strapped to her bed with a belt, listening to men dribble and drool and ramble about the diamond stuck underneath the hospital and they had to dig it out, and that they were mayors, kings of the world, she hated thinking of it, but she thought it was what she had to sacrifice, just to have her father back with her again, to never have this divine insanity take her away to a castle by the sea, away from the ones who loved her, not from a creature who claimed he was so much better than her parents, even if he was kind, warm, a long time ago.

"Okay Sonic."

She brushed his fur on his chest, where she hit him. He relaxed, and he felt as if he wanted to cry too, but he couldn't do it in front of her. Not in front of her mother either, who he could tell was just as important as Annabelle.

Her hand was still placed on his chest, feeling the warmth, the vibrations of his body. She wished she could still have it. But he needed to rest. He needed as long as a rest as she needed from this. He needed to go into his own version of a psychiatric hospital, maybe without the straps, the Thorazine syringes, the cold, still frozen food.

"I wished…"

She leaned closer, her hands wrapped around his waist. She squeezed him. And he closed his lids, listening to her soft words, as the melancholy of the sea began to fade away, the salty air drifting away to the vast recesses of her mind.

"I wished everything was back to the way it was. Me back in the hospital, my dad alive, my mommy and daddy taking care of me. I wished…all of that was back. Even if I'm not going to like the hospital…"

He held her hand as their hug was broken, bending on one knee, dropping down to her level. And he said, "I'll try to make the hospital not as scary, Annabelle. I can't take away your schizophrenia, but I can make the hospital's policies less strict, a little more understanding of children with your condition. And as for me, I'm going to be in a place for a rest like you too, maybe not in a hospital, but I guess it's what I get for what I did, because the place is cold, and it always snows, and there's no Christmas or New Year's. Just…constant snow, and it's all gray. But you'll be in my thoughts. You'll always be in my thoughts."

A white veil had begun to drape across the castle. Her mother and the small child held hands tightly, her hands no longer shriveled and bulging with veins that ran to her giant, dilapidated heart, and they watched as the castle and the throne room and the seashore that once breathed and sighed as she watched it lick and taste the sandy beach, all disappeared in the white void, and Sonic, the guardian who guarded too much of his little girl, he transformed into a crow, with its blue cobalt eyes and its yellow beech beak and its black, blue-tipped wings and had flown away from their vision, into the land far below, the land of the silver hills and the one cold season with no holidays and the dark skies, Purgatory, to rest his tired and unstable soul, for many years, possibly many generations.

—

"Annabelle? Annabelle!"

She sat in the white shrouded bed, rubbing her eyes. She noticed there were no straps, and the room was a pale corrugated yellow, as she slipped on a pair of rabbit slippers, instead of the usual brown hospital socks she was accustomed to wearing.

"It's time to take your medicine! Line up with the rest of the patients to take your pills!"

It was still winter. The branches were black, cold with the breath of the snow, and she huddled herself in the wreath of her patient attire, the hospital still as cold as it was before. Some things never changed she thought.

As she waited to take her medicine, she watched as the snow fell like drifting feathers from some great white bird in the sky, and she wondered if it was ever going to stop snowing, as Christmas and New Year's was over, and the snow was beginning to be tiring, old, as gray as her father's hair, even if he was only 28.

She thought she was beginning to grow a few gray hairs herself, as if she had lived a second life somewhere, and she was becoming older, much more experienced with her suffering.

As she drowned out her pills, she watched, and waited, for the snow to stop falling.


	12. XI (Happy)

"You have a visitor, Miss Annabelle! She's the girl that brought you your Sonic doll back at Terre Haute. I don't know why she traveled all the way here to meet you, but she says it's important."

Annabelle held the plush firmly in her arms, knowing it would never be alive, but yet she could still feel that golden heart, that heart that cared too much, beating inside him, and the eyes that sparkled in the white sterile light.

It was spring. She went through yet another winter inside the hospital, and she could already feel an improvement inside her mind. She didn't see the monsters and the nurses talking satanically as much as she used to, but the doctors claimed she would be inside the hospital for a while, recovering from what seemed to be some hidden trauma. They asked her if she remembered if anything terrible happened in her past, and except for her first year of school where her symptoms began to appear, she said she couldn't remember anything, except that she thought her father was still dead sometimes. Doctors thought of it as a delusion, but she wondered if it was anything more, a moment that once happened but was soon retraced and erased by someone else. A divine force. She knew her father was alive, but yet sometimes she still saw him bleeding everywhere he walked; when he would take his briefcase and go to work she swore she could see blood running down his suit and tie, with a knife attached to his chest.

She wondered if a god had killed him in another life. A god that wanted vengeance for something awful her father once did. But while she asked her father if he had done anything he deeply regretted, he had small, faint memories of a burning meth lab, but he wasn't sure if it applied to him at all, while her mother, she had memories of having sex and sleeping with other men, but she began to believe she was reincarnated and had memories of a past life.

They were born again. Somehow through her father's mysterious phantom death he was alive again, and a better man. Her mother once decayed of age and disgust, but she was revived, and lived no longer a life of sexual deviance. Annabelle wasn't sure what she was revived from, but possibly of a sad life in a quiet mental hospital, where she swore she once lived in Terre Haute for twp years, but the nurses said she only lived there for a few months, until she was transferred into a nicer hospital, by the girl who donated the Sonic plush to her, who said she will pay for her recovery.

This girl…what did she had to do with her? Why was she so inclined to help her? She thought she had no real special talents, except for her creativity that once got out of control in both the school and the asylum, and she didn't even know her name. She thought it was a little funny that the girl who wanted to see her was named Schiza; a slight variation of her condition that her doctors said was called "schizophrenia".

It was an ugly word, and she imagined her name was ugly too. But she sat in the cafeteria, drinking her small Dixie cup of orange juice, as this girl, with the same burnt umber hair and her brown sateen eyes, glanced at her, and the plush she carried, her stature tall and composed, and even if the girl oddly looked slightly like her, she thought that this Schiza, even if she had an ugly name, she was pretty, and she balled her hands up into a molded fist on the table, and looked at her deeply, as if she was ready to say something serious and philosophical, a womanly Socrates.

"You may be confused right now as to who I am, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that while you may not remember much, you have an angel watching over you, an angel who was very scared himself, as scared as I was when I was a child, and he tried to do everything he could to protect you, and he tried everything he could to protect me from my demons too. In this case, my father. But your father may have done a few wrong things, but he certainly isn't a bad man. And your mother, she isn't a completely bad person either. My mother tried everything to make amends for me, but I knew I couldn't forgive her. Your mother, she won't forgive what this angel did in her heart. But this angel, he isn't a bad person either even if he has done awful things. Some people who have done truly despicable things, there are reasons for them, and they aren't…bad people, truly.

"There really is no black and white. People are always gray. They both have done good things, and have done bad things. Whether in the past or in the present, or even in the future. And unfortunately, my father was a bad man, but I consider him a little gray because maybe he had a very troubled childhood. Maybe he was never taught to respect women. I don't know what happened to him in his past and I don't know if I can get any information from the rest of my family, but…I'm sure my father started out as a good person. Things happen that make some people into terrible people. Other terrible people come and infect those who they view as targets and make them into terrible people over time too. It isn't always the case but…my father was a very deadly poison, and I'm glad I'm rid of him."

She was very perplexed at this girl, who kept talking about her father and angels and about memories that she claimed she couldn't remember and were in a past life. Her mother was possibly right about being reincarnated, as she kept believing she had been in the Terre Haute Asylum for so long, but months were too short for how long she suffered there, with the harness strapped to her body, the china doll nurses injecting her with Haldol, their red sugar coated lips continuing to say she wasn't allowed to add color to those white sad walls.

She never thought an angel would watch over her, as she wasn't at all special enough to warrant one, but she wondered if they chose those with problematic lives, with truly deep troubles, to make amends for some wrongdoings in the past. Like prisoners doing public service announcements and picking the trash off the freeway. But it was much more important work. It was helping people live and survive through their traumas.

And she wondered if this same angel had taken a hold of a part of her father, a part of his soul that was murdered in this past life, and he was allowing him to walk the earth as an apparition, a spirit that reminded her of this trauma, reminding the angel of his crime so he could forever regret his act. She thought of it as a torturous punishment, but angels were supposed to be perfect, and their wings were supposed to be clear crystalline white, and this angel, his wings were bloody and stained with the red cut veins of another man he claimed was hurting her.

"Do you mean my father…he was really…and I don't know why you're helping me so much, Schiza. You're still a stranger to me. I remember you gave me Sonic when I was in Terre Haute, but…"

"Because you remind me of myself when I was younger, Annabelle. I was very sad in my childhood. I had very little friends, and my mom and dad were abusive and deprived me of a happy childhood. And this illness of yours, it's depriving you of one too. Your illness is your dark place, as my parents were. And I decided to grant you to have that guardian angel to help you, but…he was very scared over what happened to me. He couldn't get over it. I'm sorry to give you this awful piece of information to you Annabelle, but my father raped me, and that guardian angel watched and couldn't do anything about it."

Silence erupted in the room. Annabelle could tell she could see a few rushing tears in Schiza's eyes, but she tried to remain sanguine, for a girl who needed her.

"And he…swore that he would get my father back. After he made him regret everything he has ever done to both my mother and me, he made my father wish to die, and he killed him purely out of mercy. But…I still thought it was wrong, and while I hated my father, I thought it wasn't like him to do something like that. And now because of that trauma, he believed that all the girls he protected had awful fathers who wished to scar them, and while I told him it wasn't true while I prayed to him, he didn't believe me. And I still love him, but we separated more and more as time went on, because I had responsibilities. I'm beginning to get married and I'm thinking maybe of having a child, but I wasn't sure if I would let the guardian angel take care of him, as he might've got paranoid over my husband and even begin to accuse him of abusing our daughter…I wasn't sure if I wanted Sonic to be with anyone really, but I didn't think of it. I felt very bad for you. To have such a horrible illness in your young age, especially when my parents thought I was crazy and everyone else that I had an imaginary friend that could take care of you and I truly believed he was real and he could play games with me and be my only friend I ever had other than someone who…was killed in a car accident." She paused again, thinking of him. She still missed him dearly. She often cried every time someone mentioned a name similar to his, another trauma she was still trying to get past. But he was gone, and she knew he wouldn't like to see her never move on with the past.

"I didn't think he would do those things to your father, as I thought he was just a wealthy man who could do no wrong at all, but I guess just because he once sold drugs to pay for your hospital bills made him a villain in Sonic's mind."

The room evaporated in silence once more. Annabelle wasn't sure if she could think of all these serious things, and the serious things that this Sonic plush could've done to her family, this guardian angel who had a hatred of any father with any sort of deep flaw.

"I'm not saying it was right for your father to once do that, but…I understand why he did it. I understand too why he escaped from your grandfather. Turns out he lives in the same state I do, and you guys retreated to Indiana. Which is strange, because I wonder if we have any relation to each other, like you're my cousin or something? Because our hair looks quite the same, and if it wasn't for your blue eyes you'd look exactly like me."

She never met anyone else in her family, besides one of her uncles in the long past. And even then she couldn't remember his name. Her father claimed meeting her grandfather was forbidden, and she heard of a grandmother on her father's side who had the same illness, but while he heard she was inside a state mental institution, he never visited her. And her mother also had an awful grandfather and a grandmother who later died. Her mother also never allowed her grandfather to see her or even go to any family gatherings. Annabelle wondered if all her family was crazy. But if Schiza was related to her then maybe it was possible that there was still one sane family member, from all the insane father and mothers they all seemed to have.

"Anyways, I just wanted to let you know that Sonic, this guardian angel who is with you right now…he understands his errors, and he will try anything to make up for them. God was upset with him, but He understood why he did those things, and He allowed him to still watch over you, but…he has to understand that not all fathers are going to be like mine. Not all parents, despite their flaws, are abusive. And you, Annabelle, are gifted with your intelligence, your creativity, and you have very supportive parents. While teachers claimed I was intelligent, my parents were monsters, and I won't forgive them for what they did. But you seem to understand that Sonic isn't such a perfect angel either, and he will try to make amends to help you and your family. I just…didn't expect he would go that far with what he believed in, and how he felt lost and abandoned without me and that other girl he protected he told me about. He thinks growing up leads to a life of sin and debauchery. But I don't believe that. I'm growing up, and I'm becoming a biologist with a loving husband and a most likely great child. And I hope the same happens for you, even though you're only so young. You're too young to be in a place like this, but I hope they can help you in your treatment. I really hope your life will be full of love and support, forever and always."

The same term that both she and Sonic shared together. She laid her fingers on top of Annabelle's, as she could sense the plush becoming warmer, its eyes becoming brighter, and she could feel a heart, a heart that sang of heavenly and innocent music. She thought she could hear the tune of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" inside of him.

"God bless you, Annabelle. I can tell there are great things ahead of you. And I know that both Sonic and God are watching out for you. You may not believe in Him, but it took me so long, and through a healing ordeal that led me to believe that He was there, and that He deeply cares about you and me and many other people here. And Sonic…he does too. But he committed the sin of loving you so much that you choked with grief and sadness. But I will make sure he won't do it again, even if I'm much too old for him."

And Annabelle watched her as she left the cafeteria, escorted by several security guards. She thought she could see a few silver hairs collecting on her head, and Annabelle wondered if they were related that someday she would have silver hair, even what seemed to be such a young age. Her father mentioned this progressive aging disease to her, and she wondered if her father would also be old, his hands wrinkled like paper, his hair metallic and his eyes creased and faint.

But she would still love him, all the same. She would be his grandfather father. And she wondered if it could be fun.

Angels were watching her. And Sonic was an angel with black wings, an imperfect design. And he hurt her father in a past life, a life that was no longer a part of her. It was simply shed skin, as if she was a snake.

She was given a gift, a gift of making wishes, a gift of making her imagination come to life, but she didn't want it. She didn't want all this trouble, but she knew in her heart that Sonic meant well, even if he still couldn't let go of that Divinity Blade. But as Annabelle coaxed him out of his plush shell, she told him that there was no need for constant vigilance anymore, that she will be okay, that her illness will be managed thanks to these doctors who cared for her, thanks to her father and mother who loved her truly, and that no matter what, she will love him too, as she hugged the plush and could feel his radiant, pulsating heart, and she could feel his demeanor melt, his caution dying away.

Annabelle was led back to her ward, as Sonic stood beside her, his hand firmly curled inside hers, throwing away the knife in the trash, its blade drained of the blood of the sins he committed, the murders subsided, the agony dissolved.

He could hear him whisper softly into her ear as she attended group, "There's no more reason for you to cry, sweet Annabelle. Everything is alright now. Everything will be okay."

She sat staring at the sun-colored walls, smiling, the room glowing with warmth.

Her sun that once hid behind steel bars, it had returned. And it smiled with stitched teeth, the same she could see on her Sonic plush, as she could imagine it flying in the sky with white snowy wings with her vivid imagination, flowers blossoming in his wake, the birds chanting a song for her ears, and as she looked back, her Sonic plush was gone and had vanished from her grasp, and she thought that he was going to bring the sun closer for her to enjoy, make the stars illuminate brighter, and let the moon make her rest yet again on quiet nights, with vibrant dreams that set her at peace.

"I wish that you will get better too Sonic. We should all get better, for each other. I consider you my family. My flawed, my sick, but nice family who loves me."

The world grew quiet, and burst in color with gleaming greens and yellows and blues as the sun continued to grin, and the world was brighter, as he breathed out a wind of life, a pleasant wind, as he gave birth to an Elysium, where she believed she could see the past spirit of her father's back, walking on the road towards the sun, his chest no longer scarred and bloody, but healed and forgiven, and he marched on, becoming a part of the galaxy, the constellation where even the once wretched and once lost were forgiven.

The sun soon faded away, like a flickering light, as she counted all the stars in the sky as much as she could, wondering how many were praised, how many were absolved, and she thought she could see a white crow dancing in the sky like a white flame, its blue incandescent eyes gazing deep into her own.


	13. XI (Sad)

Sonic sat in the lone, cold mountains, watching as Annabelle prepared for her meal at the hospital he promised her, a hospital that would understand such smart, beautiful, lovely, and kind girls such as her, who only had an illness that continue to eat her away, her small fibers being pulled away by the dark disorder known as Schizophrenia itself.

The world was gray and covered in soot. It constantly snowed, and it was cold, frozen, like the tundra he experienced in Indiana. But he couldn't wrap himself a blanket made of hot novas and stars. Here, he will forever be cold, lonely, and never again meeting the girls he protected, the ladies that once loved him, until he committed the acts of murder on their unruly, tyrannical fathers.

They were gone in Hell. But God let him live in Purgatory.

There were hills that reached the top of the sky, colorless, the grays sapping all the life out of him. The world used to have so much color, used to been so vibrant with warmth, but his fingers, although gloved, were nearly staved off by the Snow Queen's wrath, and his eyes continued to be the sharp bladed knives they were, knives that constantly seek the drunken fathers who lived here in this cold world, the fathers who harmed their children, the fathers who were too good to be sent to Hell.

He never considered them good. He considered them heartless, their fists full of blood of wives and children, their teeth always nicotined and their jackets with a spill of blood-luscious wine, the same they drank from the necks of their children and wives. There were women who were didn't believe in God, but they sat in the frozen snow, never moving, their eyes like glass, always staring at the trees that were bare and ashamed of their nakedness, so they covered themselves with blankets of snow.

Sonic wished himself he could stare at nothing and be pleased by the grayness of the land, the silver of the skies and the constant sprinkling of snow as if December was every month, without a Christmas to excite people of the passing of its long, droll days. But he regretted. He regretted through the entirety he was here, gazing at the pictures of his fragile little girls as if his eyes would soon freeze and be encased in ice any minute.

He looked at Schiza. Oh Schiza, that wonderful, lovely girl. She grew up to be a beautiful woman. Who no longer needed him. Who passed him away.

When Schiza was about a teen, he went inside her room and sneaked in a goodnight kiss, calling her a princess, but Schiza only awoke to tell him she didn't need him anymore, and that she couldn't come back, not after what she did to her father.

"Do you forgive him for what he did to you, Schiza? Hurting you so much? Beating you? I couldn't stand to watch you gain new bruises everyday. Why would you forgive him? For making you sick. Making you rot with his vile dick. I had to make him die. He was an awful man, and even if he regret hurting you Schiza, I did him a favor. And now he's rotting in the ground, in Hell, where he rightly belongs."

"I don't forgive him Sonic," she said, turning over her covers, no longer facing him. "I just don't think…you should be doing those things at all. You're supposed to be an angel. You're supposed to do nothing but good deeds. Not hurting people. Not punishing people. Why are you doing this? My father was an awful man, but for God's sake, you can't just kill him! I'd rather let you make him suffer with the regret instead of just murdering him in cold blood. I used to have so much respect for you…now you've done something awful, and I hope to God you're somehow forgiven, but I know you won't be. I know God won't."

Crickets filled in the silence, bleeding in the pale night. The moonlight shone on her velvet blankets, and Sonic couldn't think of anything to say, but the words she said had cut his heart and made it bleed, as he thought Schiza would be happy on having her father dead, a man who destroyed her so much, had ruined her childhood, had only been committed to twelve years in jail for the murder of Schiza's happiness, her soul that once was so special, so pure.

"I'm sorry." It was all he could say. He could no longer look at her. He could no longer look at his special princess in the face. He was ashamed, and only his shoes, and the knife he had that was blackened with the blood of the sinful, he wished he could wash it away, but the blood continued to stay, blood that he wished he could hide from his darling.

She could see the black glint of his blade clearly through the darkness, silence passing between them, the crickets continuing to chirp and howl through the moonlight.

"You can't bring him back, Sonic. I know you were trying to find your place before. You being a stuffed animal. You wanting to know if you were real. But God Sonic, you're starting to go against what God had told you, and…"

"And what?"

Crickets continued to string their violin legs. He awaited an answer, but got none. And the blade near his side was beginning to rattle, and he wished it would go away, the sin of murder washing away from his red hands, the snake coiling in his mind with fangs bared. But he did it for a good reason. To make sure his precious Schiza Mahogany would never again be spoiled by the claws, by the white snake of her father, and he was protecting her, doing his part as a guardian. But yet she wasn't thankful. He felt as if she hated him for killing her most mortal enemy, the one who was supposed to love her, but instead succumbed to his hatred, his greed.

"Just never come back, Sonic. I'm a grown girl now. I can take care of myself, and Roger said he was going to take me to a good college, and I want to study very hard, I want to become a biologist, maybe even get a degree in literature. And Sonic, I can't have you anymore. I…don't know if I want you anymore, I…"

"Schiza, please…"

His voice was small, desperate, cracked. But she didn't want to listen to his pleas. He was just as evil as her father, in her eyes.

"No!" She tossed a book from her bookshelf at him, barely missing his head and instead hitting the lightly colored walls that once were pink and had pictures of castles and palaces. How she had grown. No longer with the hue of innocence. She was a different color, almost as black as his blade. Adulthood was always such a dark, ruddy color, and he grew to despise it.

He picked it up, as Schiza returned to her bed, covering herself completely in her blankets, like he remembered she used to do so long ago in the foster home, with him completely curled up next to her. But he can tell those days would never come again. She was a woman, and she only needed to curl up to another man, a man he feared would hurt her, his growing, black, spiteful little girl who he wished he could have back.

"Just go. Protect another girl who needs you. You won't let me be. I can't play with toys anymore. I can't have someone like you, a full-fledged murderer, in my life anymore. I want you gone, and you can come back sometime, but only if you think about what you did for a long time and promise me you won't hurt people anymore. You're an angel, and you should act like one, not an angel of war, not an angel of vengeance like I read about before. That's not you. I refuse to believe it's you!"

She refused to speak to him any longer. She crawled further into her blankets, until her face was inside its shawl.

Sonic heard footsteps echoing in the halls. He could tell it was Roger and Lorena, checking if she was alright from the loud clamor in her room. They worried she was having nightmares again, like she had when she was so small, such a tiny figure that carried such a large, glowing heart. Sonic thought her heart was as radiant as his used to be. His heart was no longer gold, but it began to melt, to a solid monochrome gray.

He took the book in his arms, grew his black, oily wings that had been cut and sheared from so many damaging flights, and a shower of feathers piled on the floor, and he flew off in her open window, into the bright sickly moon that looked so pale, so malnourished.

Like Schiza used to be. Everything began to remind him of her, and oh God, he missed her now. He missed those sunny summer days he played with her in the foster home, the autumn that developed in the trees that chilled them, but yet they were warm when they would talk and have a cup of hot cocoa, allowing each other to exchange philosophies even if Schiza was only a mere seven year old, him teasing her and playing games that always amounted to delightful shrieks of laughter.

He missed her laugh. How long ago she used to laugh. He thought it faded away as she grew. Maturity made things less funny to people, he thought. He could no longer have his ears prick to the jingle of her giggling, the exuberance her laughter brought to his heart. God took it away.

As he landed in Rochester Park, he looked in the streetlights of what book Schiza threw at him with such violent force and with the sharp glare of hatred, the light shining on the cover with the rabbit with the innocuous face, with its ears and body made of sateen.

And he sobbed, hoping the world wouldn't see his tears, as he clutched the book as tight as Schiza once held him, and he wished she was young again, he wished she was once again saccharine sweet, but time was cruel, and changed everything before his eyes. God took her away from him. And he began to believe his master, the one who appointed to protect this little girl, He was cruel, and He wouldn't allow him to have his happiness ever again. She was his happiness, his joy, his sun in the sky, the stars, the moon, and she had disappeared from his warm, tight arms, his gentle kisses, his soft words. The story foretold that he would simply burn away, with no one else to love him.

He still kept the book with him, in his small gray home in Purgatory, but he could barely look at it without a wince, without strained tears in his vision. He even thought of burning it in his fireplace, yet his hands shook when he held it, and some force told him _no_. _It's the only happy memory you can have of her. Your own little keepsake._

It was his identity. The angel that was once was as lost as that velveteen rabbit, and he felt his identity slipping through his tightly clutched fists again as he gazed at the next picture of the little girl he took care of when she was an infant, and he questioned his validity, his purpose that he wasn't an artificial toy, but a real angel.

He could remember her name now. Cassandra. She was a gorgeous baby, with her brown, nearly red curls on her head, her joy whenever he came around to play, when the entire house was empty, devoid of the mother and father who was supposed to love her.

He wasn't sure why he couldn't remember her name. But now he knew her as Annabelle's mother. And as he felt that Schiza threw him away for more important prospects, he threw her away too. That baby he loved and held so tender, he soon had to give her away to her father, who also hurt her, who made her believe her insides were broken. Cassandra had no history of schizophrenia in her family, but yet she had a deep delusional disorder, always wrapping her body in saran-wrap and corsets to make sure it wouldn't fall apart. She rarely took showers. She feared getting naked until she met her husband, then soon became a prostitute to help pay for her pot, her bills for Annabelle, as her regular job didn't pay much. She was even close to admitting herself into the Terre Haute Asylum when she drove herself away from her father for three consecutive days with very little sleep. There she met Edward, who happened to stop there for a small rest. He offered her a place to stay in his home, and they soon slept together, and Cassandra felt complete, and for once felt like her insides were glued, for only such a short moment.

He wished he was with her during all that time. Her father scarred her so deeply to have a delusion as bizarre as hers. But he was ordered to leave, as he was told Cassandra was a very strong woman despite her faults. But yet he believed she wasn't the right parent for his next child, Annabelle, because she was living a life of sin and sex and debauchery. She had a closet of slutty dresses ready to be worn like hungry snakes ready to swallow her, to appease her clients, and Annabelle, oh Annabelle, she knew nothing about them. The poor little girl! She knew nothing at all about her family's flaws!

And his too.

Schiza gave him to Annabelle, because she felt bad for her, not knowing that he once defended her mother. His soul returned to the plush after he pleaded with Schiza that he was forgiving of these awful, misogynist fathers, and she believed him, and told Annabelle that he would bring joy to her life.

And he hoped he did. If only, for those short, brief days. But he remembered her look of sadness, her tears that were not held back by the moon like the waves, but continued to flow, down her cheek and into her chin.

Look at that charming girl now, he thought. She's getting better. Her delusions, her hallucinations, they were beginning to fade away. And look how pretty she looked, like a blossoming flower. He at least could see her grow up, but he was sad that she couldn't grow up with him. He still felt as if he was her parent, but no longer was she his. His fur could no longer feel the warmth of another adoring child who needed his guidance. He was in the cold heart of the world, watching the snow flowing down into the river of white. He rubbed his hands, breathing into him with a wisp of white air, and he turned on the fireplace, and sat near it, eagerly awaiting for the meager heat to flow through his body. The fireplace that could only burn so much to keep him warm, as trees were quite sparse in this land. It was nothing but hills here. Gray, silver hills.

There wasn't much he could do with it snowing constantly, so he had to take up reading. God at least gave him a couple of books once in a while to pass the time. But they were very hard for him to read. Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights, The Wasteland, The Divine Comedy…he wasn't the best reader, and often spent twenty minutes on a single page. But Purgatory's time ran forever, it would always snow, and he would be bored witless otherwise, trapped in his home, only reminiscing of sad memories that always made him sob like he once had when he first heard of the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, the story that Schiza picked out for him, and soon threw away, her memories no longer attached to it. But it was always a part of him, a reason for his being, a reason why he didn't plead God to just make him dead and suffer in Hell.

As he read, over and over again, on the rabbit being loved by the boy so much, until he became shabby and old, and he was sent to the shack to be burned along with the boy's old scarlet fever-ridden toys, a fairy came to him and with one flicker of her wand, he became real.

But he wondered if because of the rabbit's choices, as if he committed crimes in the rabbit village he soon lived in, and because he missed that boy so much, he soon became velveteen again, but he was once again regarded as only trash and not a loving treasure for the boy to hoard in his arms, burnt to a smoldering flame.

He hoped one day God, the mystical being he was supposed to obey, would decide his punishment would be over, and make him real again, make him of real fur and of real jade eyes and of real shiny shoes. He felt as if he was felt again, his mouth black stitches, his ears and nose and hands barely moving, as the rabbit soon turned his insides back to sawdust, his ears to sateen, and he would stay still in the land of forever, waiting for the next boy or girl to love him until one of his eyes were missing, until his fur was dirty and unkempt.

But the velveteen rabbit was forgotten, as the snow continued to pile on the roof of his house, and the sun sidled away from the gray sky, and the blade he once carried to avenge the wrongdoings of the fathers of the girls, it lied in the snow, the black blood seeping into the ice, the blood forever running a river through the valleys of Purgatory.

He leaned back in his velvet chair, watched the snow, and sighed.

"If only I didn't," he said. And he repeated it, as his voice was just audible enough for the cold, silver papered walls, and God heard him, and could only look away.


End file.
